A little off topic, did you ever watch this recreation of the song? Blows my mind!

Fantastic Fungi, great documentary!

I write this from a Pixel 4a I bought second hand a couple years ago for 75€. It is running LineageOS with MicroG, so no Google stuff on board anymore. It feels like the perfect tool and I can’t imagine ever paying more for a phone. It already has everything I could whish for, including a great camera and a headphone jack. Sometimes enough really is enough.

It’s not natural period

The three N’s of Justification:
Eating meat is natural, necessary and normal. Check this video on carnism.

To each their own

Vegan Bullshit Bingo #6:
Food is everbody’s personal choice
How can something that others literally gave their lives for be a personal choice? Food nowadays is globally produced and distributed and affects - like most of our decisions - many more parties and beings, such as animals and our entire ecosystem. Your taste in music is a personal choice. The freedom to choose what we consume though, should not limit the freedom and well-being of others. Be it through animal exploitation, destruction of ecosystems, inhumane working conditions in the animal industry, zoonoses and pandemics, multidrug resistant pathogens, waste of resources and further consequences, that lead others to suffer.

but I can’t stand the vegans that try to put others down for eating meat

Vegan Bullshit Bingo #52:
Vegans think they are better than everyone
While it feels good to know that you have questioned traditions and made your own informed decisions in line with values that reject violence rather than promote it, you should not get on a high horse, because almost all vegans were once not vegan and everyone can take this step. However, completely refusing to address the issue is a difficult stance to take. By the way: Just because a vegan once told you an uncomfortable truth, they were not being mean to you. And even if you didn’t like a vegan once, that doesn’t question the whole point of veganism or justify continuing to exploit animals.

Nature is kill or be killed and has been since the dawn of time. Everything eats everything else.

Vegan Bullshit Bingo #1:
Lions eat meat too
Yes, animals kill in the wild - to survive. We humans are, as opposed to predators, omnivores. We know how to grow crops, vegetables, etc. and cultivate fields. We have a choice, a conscience and have ethics. Are you identifying with the intelligence and life situation of that of a lion? Do you also commonly ask yourself “What would a lion do in my place right now”? Are lions that kill newborns of other lions, for example, really good role models?

Just like those Christians

Vegan Bullshit Bingo #7:
Veganism is like a religion
That sounds like an attempt at discrediting Veganism as unreasonable and irrational, just to not seriously deal with it. As Veganism is based on facts, logic and common sense, it is the exact opposite of a religion. Consuming animal products though, mostly means blindly following irrational traditions and ignoring the facts or refusing them by reasoning: “That’s how we’ve always done it”. That sounds more like a religion to me…

that try to force religion down your throat.

Vegan Bullshit Bingo #48:
Vegans are forcing their opinion on others
Fortunately we have freedom of speech. Opinions and actions can be criticized. Especially when the critique involves valid arguments. As consuming meat is legal, vegans aren’t enforcing anything. Much rather, we are seeking education, and an open dialogue about the topic. This is unfortunately often jeopardized by a lack of proper counterarguments and the allegation we would enforce our opinion. Eating animals though, forces others to captivity, violence and death.

“Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.”
~ The Vegan Society, 1944

This looks like it costs more than my old laptop, which I saved from becoming e-waste. But I tend to forget we’re already living in the future and hubs like this exists. So, thanks for reminding me, I’ll look into it. :)

My phone doesn’t have HDMI, I don’t know how to share the screen with my TV. Plus I have an USB drive with a lot of movies attached to the computer.

I have an old laptop with Linux Mint hooked to my TV. Firefox with some bookmarks to different streaming services, Freetube with subscriptions, sunshine/moonlight to my gaming PC and emulators to play some retro adventures with my kids. I remote controll it with KDE Connect from my phone. Works great!
I used to fiddle with Kodi on a Raspberry Pi, but the laptop is so simple and easy to set up, I don’t see myself going back.

I recommend SLDL, it takes some nerves to set up but then it reads Spotify-playlists and batch downloads them from Soulseek.

This is great advice. I’m not at all interested in building and maintaining a library of stuff I won’t watch twice anyway. Resist the urge. I hooked an old laptop to my TV, put Linux Mint on it and use KDE Connect to remote control it’s mouse and keyboard with my phone. Bookmark some streaming sources in Firefox, install FreeTube for your YouTube needs, add an external harddrive for stuff your really want to keep and your have a great media center for zero money.

Signal uses Amazon’s servers, look it up. It’s all encrypted of course.

Not having children is an interesting topic I’d like to know more about. Do you have any good talks or lectures about it? I mean, we are on this planet because life propagates, it’s baked into the core of every living thing. I wouldn’t say we have to have kids, but it’s a driving force behind a lot of stuff that we do. And it is such a journey! I know kids emit co2, but to me, telling people not to have kids feels like giving up on hope and on life itself.
And I know earth is getting crowded, too. But the western world is not growing at all, other places do. So I’d say, let’s make life over there better and safer, so families over there don’t have to rely on children to look after them when the get old. Like Europe and the US did like a century ago.

The top 10 most effective actions by The Week

(In no particular order)

• Join an initiative at your workplace or start one yourself.
• Join a group that does activism.
• Vote for the most ambitious climate candidates at all levels over the next 10 years.
• Buy everything second-hand.
• Switch to green energy providers.
• Insulate your home.
• Choose less meat, eat more plant-based foods.
• Shift your banking and investments to benefit the environment.
• Switch to public transportation, bike or electric car.
• Stop flying (or reduce it by 80%).

Realitätsverschiebung?

I buy strictly second hand and spend around 70€, never more than 100€. Life is good a few generations behind, the phones I get are still absolutely adequate to daily drive. I use LineageOS with mostly open source apps, no games, no google. I have a Pixel 4a at the moment, the camera is more than enough to keep some memories. My phone is rather a sturdy tool than a toy and status symbol, I really like it like that!