rudyharrelson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkNqNYkwhlg

I enjoy listening to college radio stations. They’re usually varied in music genres and tend to reflect what college students want to put on the airwaves.

I’m a fan of 88.3FM Central Carolina Community College Radio.

I don’t think it’s morally incorrect to eat another animal.

I don’t think most vegans think so, either. It isn’t the eating in and of itself, but the suffering that occurs on the path to being food. Gas (petroleum) is widely considered vegan because, even though it’s made from dead animals (dinosaurs), they didn’t suffer and weren’t exploited to create it; they died of natural causes. Vegans (typically, I believe) don’t consider eating meat to be cruel if the animal dies of natural causes. Steer, aka castrated bulls, get their balls chopped off because it helps produce more meat (ironically steer are more muscular than bulls, TIL). I’m a guy (albeit not a vegan), and it isn’t hard for me to see that’s unnecessarily cruel and inhumane treatment.

We can debate the treatment of animals in how they are kept. But that’s another topic.

It’s not a separate topic at all. Vegans primarily care about animal suffering, which is a direct result of how the industry largely operates. Not all vegans are opposed to simply killing an animal to survive; that isn’t the core issue for most. Yes, killing an animal for food can be avoided, but as long as it’s a quick/clean kill, like an arrow to a major artery, it’s fine from a survivalist perspective because it’s humane and not unnecessarily cruel.

The meat industry is accountable for the undeniable mistreatment of animals in the course of producing food for the masses.

I’m not against vegans, but where the hell did you read that meat is bad? You can have an opinion, but that’s just not a fact. Period.

I mean, the meat industry is factually bad for the environment at its current scale. That’s not really in dispute, is it?

Millions of vegans worldwide skip that opportunity every day. You just assume every vegan is a loudmouth jerk when that simply isn’t the case. I have vegan friends and co-workers who have never, ever shamed a single person for their dietary choices. Your comment is wildly ignorant.

People complaining all day long about “annoying militant vegans” but have apparently never met the equally annoying, militant meat-lovers who deludedly believe the liberals are gonna make burgers illegal. Sure, I find opinionated vegans as annoying as the next guy, but I’ve met way, waaaay more annoying, militant Americans who would rather die than eat one less angus burger per month when their doctor recommends it to help prevent cardiac disease.

Like they’d literally rather die in their 50’s than cut out a few burgers from their diet. It’s nuts.

I don’t necessarily agree that being vegetarian/vegan is inherently more expensive than being an omnivore, but I’d like to point out the meat industry receives a lot of government subsidies (at least in the USA) and that helps keep costs down. Vegetarian/Vegan options would be more affordable if they got the same government subsidies as the beef industry. Sure, things like corn/wheat/soybeans receive decent subsidies, but most of that is for feeding, you guessed it, livestock.

How can you hate a concept that doesn’t even make any sense.

I hate lots of concepts. Nazism, for example. You could call it a concept or an ideology, but I hate it all the same. I don’t just hate the people who practice it; I hate the concept in and of itself.

There’s definitely animosity toward veganism as a concept itself. The types who use the term “soyboy” and boomers who consider eating lots of red meat some kind of manly recreational pastime.

I think “the money is made from animal parts and there are no fully vegan cars so you’re arbitrarily picking and choosing when to be vegan” misses the point of ideological veganism. I’m not a vegan, but I believe the goal for ideological vegans (in contrast with those who are vegan for medical reasons) is to minimize suffering and exploitation within reason for the specific reasons you said. No one can be 100% free of animal parts unless they become an off-the-grid self-sustained homestead.

Vegans know that. But most come to the conclusion that just because you can’t live 100% animal free doesn’t mean you can’t try to get to 80% because you want to live your life in a manner you consider morally and ethically consistent with your collective ideologies. You get as close as you can within reason depending on the various constraints of your individual circumstances. “I am still a vegetarian, and I try to be a vegan, but I occasionally cheat. If there’s a cheese pizza on the band bus, I might sneak a piece,” to quote Weird Al Yankovic.

I’d say most people, including vegans, have more than one goal in life. The “lines in the sand” you’re referring to are at the intersection of their goal to minimize suffering and their goal to, say, keep living. Like if a vegan were told by their doctor, “If you don’t start eating meat, you’ll die from this weird disease,” the vegan likely wouldn’t be like, “Well, I might as well indulge in eggs and milk and all other animal products now since I can’t be 100% vegan” and chow down. They’d probably eat just the amount prescribed by their doctor, because they still don’t like eating meat because its origins bother them.

My guy, I’m an atheist and a lot of the peeps on that subreddit were unbelievably obnoxious. Upvoting lame memes like “I’m at the library and I moved all the bibles to the fiction section LOL gottem!!”

Atheists, like any group, including vegans, have some amount of people who get to that obnoxious state with their ideology.

When I’m hosting an event, guest comfort is my highest priority. I’m not a vegan, but if anyone coming to an event that I’m hosting has dietary restrictions, you can bet your ass I’m going to be accommodating.

It’s not giving them “special treatment” in my eyes; it’s giving them basic respect as my guest. I invited them to an event because they’re a friend/colleague/fellow human who I invited to attend. It’s my responsibility as host to make sure everyone who decided to join me at the event is fed a good meal.

I sympathize with anyone who has a restrictive diet (for medical reasons or otherwise) so I consider this high on the totem pole of tasks involved in event planning. A couple of years ago my doctor told me to cut my carb intake to help lower my cholesterol a bit and it sucked majorly at any event I attended cause there’d be no low-carb options. Could eat all the bacon and eggs I wanted, though, ironically.

I’m between jobs for the first time in my adult life at the moment. My last gig lasted nearly 10 years and it was a wild ride. I found it fulfilling for a time, but I eventually got promoted to a position I wasn’t wholly satisfied with.

I started off at the very bottom rung, doing tech support for customers on the phone/chat/email. I was great at it and got promoted quickly to higher ranks of support, and eventually wound up managing the floor of tech support agents. Those were some of the best days of my life. Halcyon days.

Every day was like a really low-stakes episode of House, where in the course of helping agents solve technical issues for customers, eventually we’d encounter one really inexplicable, difficult, borderline impossible problem that nobody had ever seen before, so me and my team’s brightest would walk and talk while hypothesizing and figuring out our next move.

After a year or two of managing the floor, I got promoted to a position where I was ultimately a code monkey. Then Covid happened, and my job became fully remote for 4 years straight. Which was great! It allowed me to do my work and also spend way, way more time with my infant son during his early formative years. I got incredibly lucky in spite of the pandemic. But over time, the burnout grew to the point where I knew I needed to find something else to do with my career.

I’m lucky enough to have enough in savings that I can take a bit of time to reflect and think about what I might want to do going forward with my admittedly limited credentials.

And “driver crash”

For me, it’s probably “Frontier Psychiatrist” by The Avalanches - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLrnkK2YEcE

It’s like a weird fever dream. Catchy tune though.

Are the Goo Goo Dolls considered basic? They certainly got mainstream hype in their heyday, but I don’t think that makes them basic. Iris was one of my first favorite songs as well (I was about 9 years old when I heard the song playing at a Hudson Belk thay my mom and I were shopping at).

I’ve seen them 3 times live in concert and they’re great.

Even if you can’t afford something, emergencies can come up where one might need to spend money they don’t yet have. Battery dies in your car and now you can’t get to work? Need to buy a battery ASAP or else you miss work. Put the battery on the credit card and pay it off ASAP.

I have no love for banks, but if you’re savvy you can leverage credit cards in your favor over the years.

“You made a valid point and have changed my mind.”

Ain’t gotta sit alone in one’s room to enjoy gaming. Just about the only time I game anymore is when I’m hanging out with my friends.

I enjoyed the original songs on the jukebox in Lego Island 1. Ran at 1fps on the old family computer back in the day. Good times