I want you to know I went and bought the comic because of this post. Never been to a comic shop in my life, but the premise is too bonkers to resist.
lenz
joined 2 years ago
I know you meant this as a funny reply, and I’m sure your cat is very well taken care of.
…but I want to point out that the argument against pet ownership is more about the millions of animals in puppy mills, or on the streets, or abused by breeders, or bred with genetic issues for the sake of purity of breed. Your cat was extremely lucky to be adopted by you. But so many other cats are not. So many other cats die in shelters, or on the streets, or from euthanization, or in breeding mills. We create and fund the system that brings the unlucky cats into existence, for our own benefit.
The argument is that all those millions of cats and dogs that suffer and die so we can choose a few of them to pamper as pets, is not worth it.
Your cat isn’t an abuse victim. But all the other cats who weren’t so lucky, are.
Plus animal abuse is incredibly hard to discover: because animals cannot go to the police and report their owners. Lol. They don’t have voices. That makes them incredibly easy victims to exploit. Humans as a whole are really a hard group of people to trust with such vulnerable creatures, ngl.
I’m very fun at parties, I know.
My most charitable interpretation of you bringing up that spiders have frog pets is that, because pet-ownership is a thing that other animals do, it’s okay/natural for humans to do them too. And if we argue that it’s not okay for humans to do it, it must be because we think humans are inherently superior or something. Hopefully it’s accurate because that’s how I understood you.
This leads me to say:
The difference between us and other species that develop ownership/shepherding/symbiotic/whatever relationships with other creatures, is that humans can conceptualize morality. (inb4 the “morality is subjective” line: yeah, it is. But if you agree that suffering, torture, etc is a bad thing then we’re on the same page here axiomatically.) Unlike spiders, or farmer ants, we understand that causing other creatures to suffer is wrong. Because we are smart enough to understand, we have the responsibility to act in accordance with that understanding.
Another point is: male lions kill the cubs of other lions. Dolphins rape each other. Rats eat their own babies sometimes. Cats play with the mice they catch before killing them. The natural world is full of animals doing horrific things to each other. If you are going to say that it’s okay for humans to keep pets (or whatever) because animals do it/it’s natural… why can’t humans kill and eat their own babies? It’s because we know causing others to suffer is wrong, and therefore hold ourselves to a higher standard. We ARE superior: in the sense that we’ve invented philosophy and morality. That’s not a weird take. And it’s not a take that’s incompatible with this argument.
Similarly, we don’t hold our own children accountable for their crimes to the same degree we hold adults. If a kid steals money, or beats someone up, our society doesn’t punish them the same way as an adult. Because we understand that their brains have not yet developed the capacity to fully understand empathy. To truly be responsible for the suffering they cause.
Animals are, a lot like human children in that sense.
Therefore, we totally can “exist in a category of responsibility distinct from all other organisms.” We literally already do when it comes to things like murder, rape, and torture. Why not add distressing and frightening animals to take photos with them, or keeping them in cages, or what have you; to the list of things we should take responsibility for?
I hope that helps clear up the confusion for you.
Both. Matrix for all occasions except when streaming a game, then Discord.
Ok doomer.
I say the above not as an insult, but because I want to make a point.
Look up doomism. It’s a tool of climate change deniers. We are not dead yet. Nothing going on now is truly impossible to fix. It’s certainly not easy. It’s hard af. But just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean we should let ourselves give up. We shouldn’t let ourselves fall into a doomer mindset. Because the very moment we do, the moment we accept the doom, then the doom becomes our fate.
Don’t give up. Don’t encourage other people to give up. Don’t say it’s over when we’re still fighting. It’s only over when it’s over.
I bet World War II must have been psychologically devastating to witness. It must have felt like the whole world was falling apart. Like it would never bring itself back together. Can you imagine? Watching Hitler take over country after country. Watching the bombs fall in London. And the Cold War. Where people were so sure it was the end of humanity, because we were going to kill ourselves dropping nukes on each other.
There are so many moments it was horrible. So horrible that we couldn’t even imagine there would be a way out. A good future.
But there was. Things got better. Countries rebuilt. The Cold War ended. No one dropped any nukes.
See, climate change, and companies taking our data, and AI, and the rich getting richer… all that? That’s our WWII. That’s our thing causing hopelessness and devastation and fear in everyone.
The doomism is a plague we’ve been dealing with since probably the dawn of humanity.
We can get through this. Maybe we won’t. But the chance we will isn’t even that small. As long as there’s a chance: fight for it.
I just use this god-tier free, open-source app: https://hydrusnetwork.github.io/hydrus/index.html
It’s called Hydrus Network, and it’s like an organized database for managing your pics, videos, and more.
Features include: tagging images, adding notes to images, saving urls for images, searching your collection for duplicates and letting you compare them to keep the highest quality image, dark mode, meta tags, and more.
It’s literally one of my top 5 most essential apps to my life, and it’s so unknown. I feel like a cultist because I’m always harping on about how great Hydrus Network is and no one knows about it.
An end to the problem of aging, and death. Whether that means turning into cyborgs, I don’t care. I just want to choose when I die. Not having dying slowly happen to me like a terminal illness. Plus life is way too short. If I get tired of immortality let me off myself. But let me at least get tired of it first.
I got a 17/20, which is awesome!
I’m angry because I could’ve gotten an 18/20 if I’d paid attention to the thispersondoesnotexists’ glasses, which in hindsight, are clearly all messed up.
I did guess that one human-created image was made by AI, “The End of the Journey”. I guessed that way because the horses had unspecific legs and no tails. And also, the back door of the cart they were pulling also looked funky. The sky looked weirdly detailed near the top of the image, and suddenly less detailed near the middle. And it had birds at the very corner of the image, which was weird. I did notice the cart has a step-up stool thing attached to the door, which is something an AI likely wouldn’t include. But I was unsure of that. In the end, I chose wrong.
It seems the best strategy really is to look at the image and ask two questions:
- what intricate details of this image are weird or strange?
- does this image have ideas indicate thought was put into them?
About the second bullet point, it was immediately clear to me the strawberry cat thing was human-made, because the waffle cone it was sitting in was shaped like a fish. That’s not really something an AI would understand is clever.
One the tomato and avocado one, the avocado was missing an eyebrow. And one of the leaves of the stem of the tomato didn’t connect correctly to the rest. Plus their shadows were identical and did not match the shadows they would’ve made had a human drawn them. If a human did the shadows, it would either be 2 perfect simplified circles, or include the avocado’s arm. The AI included the feet but not the arm. It was odd.
The anime sword guy’s armor suddenly diverged in style when compared to the left and right of the sword. It’s especially apparent in his skirt and the shoulder pads.
The sketch of the girl sitting on the bench also had a mistake: one of the back legs of the bench didn’t make sense. Her shoes were also very indistinct.
I’ve not had a lot of practice staring at AI images, so this result is cool!
It has been found that the greatest deterrent is “likelihood of getting caught”, and not the actual penalty. Think of the war on drugs. No matter how harsh they made the consequences, the drug trade continued. It’s like this: how likely are you to return a wallet you found to a lost and found if a cop was watching you, versus if you were out in the middle of the woods when you found the wallet?
It doesn’t matter if the penalty for not returning the wallet is death. If the likelihood of you getting caught is tiny enough, you will feel less terrified of playing those odds. Or at least, the average person will.
The death penalty isn’t a deterrent if you’re certain it will never apply to you.