Imagine you're peacefully going about your day acquiring food for you & your family and playing with your mates and then this mentally ill animal begins violently screaming relentlessly, non-stop, for hours at a time. You would assume something is fatally wrong with it. It must be dying or is being eaten alive. That's what you are to an animal when you use power tools, blast music, mow the lawn on a tractor, etc. And the animal is fucking right. You're mentally ill. You're making the commotion of an animal in the throws of a nightmarish death for zero fucking reason. Pack your bags kids, we're getting the fuck out of here.

Or when you're taking a hike in the woods to observe wildlife; to an animal you're basically a child predator. If an animal was just loitering around your property, peeking in your windows, and had nothing better to do with its time than watch you like you're some kind of pleasure-object for its satisfaction, you'd run the fuck away too.

Have you ever noticed how in nature documentaries all the different species of animals will spontaneously organize to share the same space with each other near water and food sources? They'll pack in tighter than a headline crowd at Warped Tour and feel just as sentimental leaving. Do you know why that is? It's not because they handed a secret password to each other beforehand, or debated in 20 international conferences to excrete a peace treaty, it's because they have a real fucking purpose there and they're not raping the vibe by screaming violently with every fucking thing they do. They run from you because you're fucking mentally ill.

On behalf of all the animals who constantly take the high road and quietly move their business elsewhere: fuck you.

I'm seriously considering if an extinction event from climate change acceleration (which is basically the conservative party's entire platform at this point) will be preferable to me continuing to try to work with the lazy, disinterested & often outright adversarial liberal parties whose sole concession to my demographic is nothing more than acknowledging climate change exists (those virtues won't signal themselves!)

Interacting with liberals/leftists for the past few years has honestly destroyed whatever faith I had remaining in humanity. For too long I was under the false impression that liberals cared about anything. It turns out liberals care about something only as far as addressing it won't inconvenience their lifestyle even slightly.

When the supposed "good guys" are this useless, evil, & unwilling to make even the tiniest changes to their toxic opulent lifestyles, what is the point of even trying to preserve this? I don't want it anymore. Maybe we'll get to try again in a few million years after this new dinosaur age we're accelerating into transitions back into another ice age. Who knows how lucky it was that we even got to evolve into such a privileged position in the first place. We may very well be the last lifeforms this sophisticated to evolve on this planet during its lifetime.

Zero concessions from liberals for actions needed for the things I care about; the planet and not participating in exploitation. My vote is somehow expected though.

I'm done. Go next.

It was cross-posted in Anarchy101, socialism, SocialismIsCapitalism, FedEmployees, capitalism, anticapitalism, leftist, and ConservativeYouth.

No surprise it was poorly received in FedEmployees (perfect name btw... employees who are well-fed indeed... some might even say over-fed!) as well as leftist. Liberals/leftists are self-important bureaucratic boot sniffers who want to be worshipped for putting a human resources department in a dog house. No more butt sniffing during walk time on their watch! Meanwhile they'll spare no excuse to make 12 trans-continental flights annually for consultations—that could be replaced by a single-digit-reply email chain—paid for by government grant money via the non-profit they work for that does the classic 99:1 ratio for resources dedicated to salary & vactions vs actual aid going to their professed cause. They wouldn't take a refugee into one of their multiple homes if they were paid $10 grand a month to do it but they want the shithole town two hours away to do it for free with smiles on their face. They shop at Whole Foods, "believe in climate change", and still buy animal products. They're meek MAGA; hypocrites to their very core.

What is surprising is that it was hated on and banned in Anarchy101! This actually fits my hunch that "anarchists" are just closet big-government lovers who still live on their parents' dime but like to larp about La Revolucion! at dinner and family functions. Who needs all that stress of building a new world when you can just dye the tip of your mohawk green, blue or red and snarl in selfies?

Also surprising is that it was received well in socialism, anticapitalism, and ConservativeYouth. The socialists are a bit more serious about change than the "anarchists" (though that's not saying much), and conservatives (at least their youthful members) seem somewhat open to a much needed shake up as well.

Edit: Nevermind, socialism banned it as well despite it having a positive ratio.

In the US many like to think that our welfare system is small and limited to things like food stamps, subsidies and grant systems. My sweet summer child, nothing could be further from the truth.

For instance, our entire court system is an unofficial welfare ecosystem for judges, administrative staff, police officers and lawyers to rake in massively inflated salaries, wages and benefits packages that are many times what the average person in their locality makes for comparable labor in the private sector.

This is how the bulk of welfare actually functions in the US. It often isn't created by being shoehorned into a 2,000 page bill out of the goodness of some legislator's heart. It's the clockwork pay raises every government creature guarantees themselves every single year, and the all-you-can-eat buffet of benefits packages they entitle themselves that would make a tiktok buffet crasher blush.

It's doled out by creating redundant, unnecessary, and inefficient jobs that give the illusion of value creation. The vast majority of the work done in nearly every government agency, and how they go about doing that work, would result in more overall value if it simply weren't being done at all. The official welfare programs like SNAP that feed inner city welfare queens are mere crumbs of the real welfare deep state. (And yes, some of those inner city welfare queens indeed do abuse programs like SNAP—they're often no better or more noble than a judge, lawyer or police officer awarding themselves 6 figures and a retirement with 3 houses at 50, they just operate on a smaller scale.)

Nobody who sincerely cares about a cause—like for instance, justice—would take a single cent beyond what's needed for them to do their work and live humbly. We see the exact opposite in every single government position: maximal compensation for them to perform a service done as inefficiently as possible, usually scornfully of the taxpayers who are forced to use it, and which hasn't been updated for decades to meet modern demands & expectations.

If you've ever had the displeasure of interacting with any government agency, you know that if that agency's function were ever to be privatized—and subject to any level of competition at all—that it would be eaten for breakfast and shit out the same day to be thrown on a compost heap where it belongs.

End the waste. Compost Government. Heal.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

Resources divorced from outcomes & performance will always be corrupted.

If you care about the planet and the innumerable life which inhabits it, or even just the future of the human race, then it would benefit you to watch this the whole way through. Most common climate change denials are given context & perspective in very clear & concise ways, and it paces naturally as a response to a conversation between two prominent deniers: Joe Rogan and Mel Gibson.

When I began data dieting a few months ago I couldn't have anticipated the profound impact it would have on my life in such a short period. I see now I was a bit of an entertainment junkie, consuming a near-constant stream of single-use disposable content. From the standpoint of CO2 emissions it could likely be excused as a lesser evil but lt could be that the pollution it was causing in my life is maybe just as pernicious, depleting perhaps my most precious resource: my time.

It was a fantasy I lulled myself into believing that "one's mind needs rest from focus on productive matters". I no longer believe this is true. If we allow ourselves to relax into feelings of boredom, or of being unsure as to what we should be doing, it's incredible how quickly & reliably those feelings are resolved into inspired productive action. I don't know if this is largely unique to me but I have a powerful aversion, and maybe even an incapability at this point, to laboring for something I don't believe in or am morally opposed to. It could actually be that I'd rather die than do something I feel is ultimately harmful. I NEED to be able to directly trace how every sacrifice I make will serve my higher ambitions to improve the world. All that's to say that even with standards this compulsive my boredom still never fails to surrender to motivated purpose.

This to me is the unrecognized importance & beauty of scarcity. When something is burdened to us in the form of an unlimited resource, it will inevitably overtake even the most sturdy boundaries we set for it, washing us away in the turbulent rapids of its inexhaustibility. When a resource is scarce to us, and we must carefully manage & budget it, its ability to dissolve our lives completely vanishes. It becomes a companion rather than a master.

The source of awareness itself seems bound to scarcity. There's the old saying "I don't know who discovered water but it certainly wasn't a fish." A baby in the womb has negligible awareness, why? because all of their needs are provided for by the mother. The baby is a true slave to the mother and it's only by the quirks of human instinct that this relationship may resemble some kind of symbiosis through the mother's inherited devotion. We simply can't perceive things without contrast. "Abundance", "unlimited" and "excess" are inherently formless & monotonous. I've found this to be true in my own life. The most profound expansions of my awareness have seemingly all happened through being denied my routine desires.

Scarcity doesn't just create character, scarcity IS character. Limitations are the bones & skin, the costume, through which energy can inflate and animate. Without these, only a fragile, smelly, featureless cloud of undirected energy could be produced.

Now to tie this all to my recent foray into data dieting, I now have a profound awareness of the cost this data has had on my time, energy, and wallet. It's new scarcity has afforded me the ability to appraise the value it was adding, and can add, to my life in the future. I can now budget it and more harmoniously fit it into the broader ethical lifestyle I'm forever striving to adhere to and improve.

The world today is gluttonous and further abundance is the last thing it needs—other than an abundance in purpose & meaning, which it sorely lacks. The state of human greed & ignorance is so dire & depraved that the planet itself is now ramping up to begin defaulting on all further withdrawls. If that should happen then a very real, non-conspiratial, version of a "Great Reset" will be violently inflicted on all of our lives whether we've prepared for it or not or can even survive it in the first place.

We have a chance now to mend our ways and build a harmonious future for all life; and pursuing this will even be infinitely more fun & satisfying than your current addicted lifestyle; guaranteed. It may already be too late, it's not sure to work, but we have nothing to lose and everything to gain by trying.

Full Disclosure: The following methods require an intermediate/advanced familiarity with computers and the terminal to be able to adopt & troubleshoot comfortably. Most will unfortunately find these methods to be arcane. This is not by design. At every step I endeavored to trace the easiest route to accomplish this goal. I could find no simpler way. Additionally, my lifestyle is such that it requires frequent use of the internet for research and work related tasks. If this is not the case for you then you can likely just use the default modern web-browsing methods more thoughtfully and achieve a similar financial result. I suspect you wouldn't be reading this on reddit though if this was the case for you.

For those skeptical of the relation of this practice to environmentalism, anti-consumption, degrowth, or animal rights, my view is that a reduction of demand in any consumer domain will indirectly result in a reduced supply of that domain and will by extension reduce its burden on the environment & wildlife resources that ultimately fund all economic enterprises.

All that said, if you've already implemented some of the bigger consumption-reduction practices—vegan/plant-based diet, transportation reduction/consolidation/publication, living multi-generationally/with-family/with-friends, manual garbage processing, home heat loss mitigation, etc.—then I believe this is a perfectly acceptable target for a greater overall consumption diet. Further, if you do have a few of those bigger reduction practices under your belt then you've likely saved yourself a good chunk of extra cash & free time to be able to learn & experiment with an advanced reduction practice such as this. I'll do my best to answer troubleshooting questions in the comments as I come across them.

Intro:

I consider this to be a 90s camp. It's what it feels like to me as I explore it. To me the 90s are defined by significant entertainment + (low-res) computer usage without a lot of internet. I think camping in earlier eras, like the 80s (high entertainment from mostly non-computer media), or 70s (high entertainment from broadcasts + crude electronics), could be valuable as well but right now the 90s feels like a better fit for me so that's where I'm pitching my tent.

Baseline (where I started):

• Unlimited internet plan @ $54.95/mo
• Mint Mobile 5gb phone plan @ ~$15/mo
• Total: ~$70/mo
• Internet habits:
  • Google Chrome left open with 20-50 tabs open constantly.
  • M1 Macbook Air laptop, acquired in 2022, always teetering on the edge of memory overload ("Close apps to free up space" dialog would pop up every few days or so)
  • Watch a good amount of youtube for education & entertainment, utilizing youtube's search and playlist functions to download (or redownload) anything I choose.
  • Use google search for word definitions, math calculations, and AI search summaries to get answers & sources for things in as low an effort as possible.
  • Never thought about or even knew how much data I was using.

Current (where I am now):

• Tello 10gb phone plan @ ~$15/mo
• Total: ~$15/mo
• Internet habits:
  • Text-based web browser left open and ~20-50 text-versions of sites buffered offline (w3m).
  • M1 Macbook Air laptop (same as above), with no memory issues at all and multiple GBs of unused ram available at any given time.
  • Watch probably ~50% as much youtube for education & entertainment as before, now prioritizing educational content more (unintentionally), and downloading rewatchable content only once in low-data formats to store it locally and watch it whenever I wish.
  • Use an offline dictionary for word definitions, offline programs for math calculations, and no AI search summaries; instead using locally stored manpages, downloaded webpage files, or lightweight search engines like duckduckgo along with search operators to employ more intelligent searches manually.
  • Hyper-aware of the data cost of everything I do on the web.

How I did it:

Note: While this guide can likely be applied to any operating system (Windows, Linux, Mac) without much modification, I used a macbook for all of this so it's going to be from the perspective of MacOS. Alter the directions to your OS accordingly.

First, there was light!

Awareness is the first step. (nettop):

We can't fix what we can't see. How do we "see" the bandwidth we're using? The vast majority of users don't think about or care about this (which included me until a short time ago) and so modern OS designers don't really provide simple or robust ways of revealing this information. This is where nettop comes in; a command line program that's bundled into MacOS. All it does is periodically report the amount of bandwidth a process has used since the last interval. So if you set nettop's interval to report every 10 seconds, it will tally up all the bytes each of the processes it's tracking for 10 seconds and then print to the console the totals for each of those processes over that 10 second window. And it will do this in perpetuity until you shut it off.

Here's how I invoke the command:

% nettop -P -d -c -x -p 'Python' -p 'Google Chome H' -p 'w3m' -s 15 -l 0 -J time,interface,bytes_in,bytes_out"

The -p arguments limits its reporting to just the processes I'm interested in; in this case Python, Google Chrome, and w3m. (note: you need to provide the exact process names, so proper capitalization is important) The -s 15 option sets the reporting interval to 15 seconds. The -J time,interface... option limits the data in the report to just those 4 fields. For info on the rest of the options, refer to the manpage (type man nettop in your terminal).

Once you have this command running, go about some of your regular internet tasks. After you load a new webpage or view a video, switch back to the terminal with the nettop process running to see how much bandwidth that action used. (note: the bytes_in and bytes_out fields of nettop are in, you guessed it, bytes. So to figure out the rough kilobyte or megabyte values, just imagine there's a comma added every 3 digits from the right of the number. The "thousands" places corresponds roughly to kilobytes and the "millions" places corresponds roughly to megabytes. So a bytes_in value of 58922 would be about 59kb (58,922) and a value of 1733452 would be about 1.7mb (1,733,452). There's an option in nettop to use "human-readable" versions for these number reports, displaying them in kibibytes and mebibytes automatically. Refer to the manpage for details.)

A return to darkness.

Exhuming the forgotten skeletons of the web. (w3m):

w3m is a text-based web browser on the console. It doesn't support javascript and so it's limited to pages which implement some kind of html or text structure. Luckily, most websites—even a lot of modern ones—still provide some version of their pages in this simple, lightweight form. Of all the things in this guide, this one has the steepest learning curve. In order to navigate the web efficiently in a text-based browser (and really the console in general) you must familiarize yourself with many hotkeys. Realistically though, if you're diligent in your effort, you can get a workable familiarity in a day or so, and real proficiency after a few weeks.

To install w3m you can use a package manager (macports or homebrew on mac) or you can find the binaries online. You can also compile the latest build yourself though that's probably more technical than you're looking for. So there are options available to you to get this thing; it's a software with an active & committed community.

To use w3m after you install it, either invoke it in your terminal in the form

% w3m <website-url>

or use

% w3m -B

to open its internal bookmarks page and navigate elsewhere from there. There is a very deep rabbit-hole to this program. It's very customizable to whatever your needs are. You can link it with command line dictionaries to do offline word lookups. You can create commands to send queries to various search engines like duckduckgo. You can selectively view images right in the console (must use a terminal that supports the kitty protocol—such as kitty or ghostty—or compile it with imlib2 support if using a console like iTerm). This is just scratching the surface and fully detailing this program's capabilities is beyond the scope of this post.

The short of this all is that by loading only the text of most of the webpages you use you end up saving a tremendous amount of bandwidth. When w3m idles, it isn't phoning home or drawing any data. In contrast, if you leave Google Chrome open, even if you don't have a single tab open, it will cost you about 5mb just to sign into your profile, and then will eat about 50-70kb every 5 minutes or so I guess to tell google about what your underwear smells like. To load just the home page in Chrome will cost you 1-2mb. Some modern websites that seem like there's very little data being exchanged can draw hundreds of megabytes in a short span of using them (and remember, a gigabyte is only 1000 megabytes; gigabytes can go very fast if you aren't counting your bytes!)

Links to w3m learning & inspiration material I found helpful:

Helpful w3m guide & overview

w3m manual

Youtube user gotbletu's page with lots of helpful w3m and command line videos

Youtube user gotbletu's w3m playlist

But not without a splash of color!

Let's face it, we need our youtubez. (yt-dlp):

yt-dlp is a command line utility that can perform youtube searches and download videos and audio in various formats of your choosing. How I use it is I get a link to a video or playlist that I'm interested in and then I run the following:

% yt-dlp --get-title --list-formats <url>

This will confirm that I'm targeting the correct video (seeing the title) and will show  me all of the video & audio formats that I can download for it. One of the cool things about yt-dlp is that if you have ffmpeg installed (another command line utility that converts video & audio formats) you can choose separate video & audio tracks and yt-dlp will mux them together. Using this feature I can really fine-tune the resulting video so it's a perfect balance between quality and data usage. If I need to read text in the video I'll find a video source in the format list of at least 360p and then pair that with the smallest audio source. If I'm downloading a live performance of a music artist, where the video quality is less important to me, I'll often choose the 144p option for video and choose the highest fidelity audio track that my tastes & data budget can justify.

So once the video and the desired formats are identified, I'll run this command:

% yt-dlp -f "<vid-format-id>+<audio-format-id>" <url>

Note: yt-dlp downloads to the current directory, so 'cd' into the directory you want the downloads to be sent to first.

If you want to target a specific item in a playlist url, you can do:

% yt-dlp -I <item-number-of-playlist> -f <formats> <playlist-url>

You can also use the "-I <item-number>" option for selecting the nth result of a search:

% yt-dlp -I 6 -f <formats> "ytsearch10:veganism"

And that will download the 6th result of the youtube search for "veganism" that stopped after 10 results.

There are many more options for this tool and they're meticulously outlined in the manpage (man yt-dlp).

Practical logistics of managing 10gb/mo:

10gb/mo provides one with 333mb per day. Text-based based browsing, along with non-video/audio downloading and occasional recourse to a gui browser, will eat up 10-100mb of that daily budget depending on degree of usage. This leaves us with ~200-300mb of data for video & audio content which we'll likely be extracting from youtube. If our needs are such that we only need video resolutions at 360p (adequate for reading most text in a video), and we don't need the highest fidelity audio, then each minute of 600x360p with down-res'd audio is only about 1.5mb. So with a 200-300mb data budget, we can safely download 130-200 minutes of new lower-res video+audio, or 2 to 3.5 hours. If we only download audio this figure may be twice or three times as much. And remember, because we're storing this media locally, we can still access all of the older content we stored on previous days (and with effectively zero delay as well).

Closing considerations:

If you're inspired to try any of this I suggest setting up and getting familiar with the above 3 main components (nettop, w3m, and yt-dlp), as well as the terminal in general, while you're still on your unlimited plan. Attempting to learn and manage all of this while under the pressure of a 10gb budget would be difficult. Give yourself a few days or weeks to work out the kinks and make sure you can reliably meet that 333mb daily data budget before switching. You can also start with a higher 20gb/mo budget and just pay a bit extra to start. That would afford you 667mb per day.

Lastly, if you found all of this helpful and are planning to give this a try, you can use my Tello referral link to get $10 off your first month's subscription (Tello only charges month-to-month afaik). That means you'd pay $5 for the first 10gb/mo, and $15/mo after that, month-to-month. The incentive for me to provide you my link is that I get a $10 credit if you stay with Tello for 3 months. I'm not affiliated with Tello in any way, they're just the cheapest I found and I think they provide an ethical data model (allowing you to pay for only the data you use, not requiring you to go unlimited and effectively subsidize the biggest data users). If a better or more ethical provider comes along I'll switch to them. I think it's good to promote & support ethical producers so that they gain a market advantage, which longterm will incentivize ethical practices to become the default. If you know of a better provider let me know in the comments and I'll update this post.

Tello referral link -- $10 off
Or use referral code at checkout: P3QNJZ9Z

I've been seeing a common confusion about what exactly empathy is.

Empathy is not a feeling or a reflex or "something you're born with" or anything like that. It's far more simple.

It's also not something that just happens to you. It's not passive. Instead, it can only be engaged in by actively choosing to do so.

Many of us naturally develop our capacity for empathy out of curiosity as children. We'll simply wonder "What would it be like to be this other person in this situation?" Usually this kind of engagement of our imagination is inherently satisfying, not only because it helps us learn, but also because it allows us to contemplate and experience lives beyond our own. We're no longer limited to our own narrow experience of things; by using imagination to practice empathy we end up cultivating a far richer experience in our own lives and significantly expand our possibilities for how we may choose to live in the present & future.

Unless you're incapable of imagining things then you have every capacity to develop & practice empathy. One's ability to vividly imagine is directly proportional to one's ability to empathize. So if you ever wonder why you're "not feeling any empathy" when another person around you is clearly suffering, you're not broken, it's because you're not actively trying to imagine what it would be like to be them in their situation.

We're in an age of unprecedented abundance, and before the keyboard-marxists come marching in to declare

"Nuh uh! It's only the billionaire's in yachts who are rich, regular people are peasants today and have never been poorer!",

one has only to observe the frightening normalcy of obesity not only in the general population but ESPECIALLY in "the poor". Poor people are literally two times more likely to be obese than wealthier people. That's not a poverty of resources, that's a poverty of responsible resource management.

Listen, I'm not here to dunk on fat people. They're operating out of ignorance and likely trauma as most people are in various aspects of their lives. My aim here is far broader than any individual species of excess, of which caloric overindulgence is just one.

I'm going to draw parallels between two things: 1) The metabolism of cancer within the human body, and 2) The metabolism of industrial revolutions within Western culture.

When we consume food our body breaks it down into small nutrient components and then ships them down the lazy river of our bloodstream where they float freely past every organ neighborhood of the body. The cells of each organ can grab any of these passing nutrients that they find useful. It's a very generous & trusting system that mostly assumes every cell which would take those nutrients is only taking exactly as much as it needs and is acting in good faith to sustain the overall body.

Now let's zoom out. For nearly all of human history, resources have been scarce & hard fought and the work required to do anything more than survive and engage in small-scale amusements was arduous. There are few examples of significant works undertaken in this austere era, and we justly herald them as "wonders" for their ability to achieve such greatness in spite of such limitation. These are the "7 wonders of the world", which include the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China.

In that pre-industrial era if you wanted to murder a group of people of any magnitude there was almost nothing you could do about it unless you were a king who had command of some sizable military. At best, with your primitive tools and a very community-dependent access to food, you could probably murder a couple people over a prolonged stretch of time before you'd likely get caught and be murdered yourself as a result.

If you wanted to engage in some large-scale project you'd have to personally convince dozens of people in your community to sacrifice their precious free time for weeks to months to years to manually assist you in the digging/moving/lifting/processing of that enterprise. By necessity, a project of any magnitude had to be perceived as valuable to large groups of people AND had to justify the huge manual labor investment required to be completed.

Fast-forward to today. Want to murder a large group of people on a whim? Go to Walmart, buy a machine gun for $500 and commit your massacre before lunch. Want to clearcut & terraform 20 acres of forested land as a single 75 year old man with dementia, 2 slipped discs and a knee replacement to create a warehouse complex for your extensive taxidermy collection? Rent or hire out a 450 horsepower mechanical tree trimmer to clear the forest in the morning, then rent a 250 horsepower backhoe to level the cleared land in the afternoon, and then pay a construction crew for the following day to construct the warehouses with insulated metal panels. Total cost: $2,500 and a 2-5 day turnaround.

Now let's zoom back in. What happens when we consume excess nutrition and some of the cells in our body aren't healthy and aren't acting in good faith to sustain the body they belong to? What if those diseased cells are only programmed to grow & multiply without any concern for their impact on the health of the body? Well now that generous & trusting bloodstream delivery system is acting as a toxic enabler to these mutated cells. They're difficult for the immune system to identify & destroy as well because they're just mutated healthy cells, and so they look very similar to healthy cells. When these mutated cells become present—and when we have 35 trillion cells constantly undergoing mitosis & interacting with foreign agents it's all but an inevitability—every excess nutrient is a buffet for these tumor-cells to feast on.

TLDR

Excess resources, or overeating, cause quick satiation of healthy cells which refuse any excess, and then any additional nutrients—which the satiated healthy cells refused—will go on to feed insatiable cancer cells to grow & spread for their selfish exclusive benefit. On the scale of societies, industrial revolutions—with their huge influxes of cheap & easy resources—function identically to overeating; quickly satiating healthy humans who are working for the health & sustainment of their planet (analogous to healthy cells serving their body), and then all of the excess resources will overflow into the hands of insatiable tumor-minded people who's only goal is the grow & spread for their selfish exclusive benefit.

Excess resources are the cause of cancer because every cell and every human being is capable of being mutated through trauma or sheer chance into becoming a tumor-program—even immune cells and regulatory agencies!—and so every single chronically excess resource is a liability and a ticking time-bomb for cancer to grow & spread both individually and culturally.

I see so many pointless conversations tallying quantities of suffering to promote or dispute veganism. Suffering is a distraction and an undeserving casualty in the quest for liberation. Suffering, in the vast majority of its applications, is informative to the person experiencing it. It's a teacher. One of the very few exceptions to this is when suffering occurs under exploitation. Under exploitation suffering no longer remains a teacher, instead it becomes an externality or liability to the exploiter and an unredeemable tax to the exploited.

The natural meaning of all things becomes perverted under exploitation. The narrow whims of the exploiter eclipse the selfless laws of physics. To exploit is to deem oneself more important than not just the exploited but also the very laws which created this shared existence. Exploitation has no respect for the higher order which sustains it. It is the cancer which destroys the body it parasitizes. Everything that exists before us in its natural state is the carving out of eons of relentless self-correction operating on every order & scale simultaneously. It is already as close to perfect as can be attained. Every scheme we hatch to steal more for ourselves will always betray our ambitions in a way we couldn't anticipate, like the cursed wish fulfillments of an evil genie.

So leave suffering alone, it did nothing wrong. Save your bile for the real poison which should not have been swallowed, the original sin, exploitation.

Everything is interdependent. If you pull the bread basket towards your side of the table you're pulling it away from those sat to the other side. We think of the resources of our planet as so abundant as to be inexhaustible but we now see that this was a naive fantasy, and we are the generation which has begun to press up against its limits. Where in the recent past one could be forgiven for believing in a dream of endless abundance—and have it be effectively granted even—today our reality is soberly & unquestionably zero-sum.

If there is any spring to your mettle this should not be discouraging. The creative challenges to achieve our dreams sustainably are not insurmountable, they have merely risen. It's very easy in times of hardship to adopt the mentality of a tumor cell whose sole ambition is to grow & seek pleasure for itself, and itself alone. We should do our best though to remember that our true nature is very much like the individual cells within our own body; small but vital entities which serve the greater body to which they belong. This higher nature not only serves the greater body but also the humble cells themselves. The body insulates them from higher order challenges and they in turn insulate the body from lower order ones. It's a perfect manifestation of harmonious symbiosis.

The body that we belong to and serve is of course our planet, Earth.

If you think these restrictions seem completely incompatible with making cooking easy while also tickling your tastebuds, let this post to prove you wrong!

1. The entire art of cooking is to simply not overcook anything and not undercook anything.

• If we ever have doubts about when to add something or how much longer to cook something, just remember this rule and use it as a guiding principle.
• What can happen is we add all of our veggies to the pot at the same time and then as we're trying to get our potatoes to turn soft, all our greens have now become an overcooked sickly green-brown sludge. To get everything to cook perfectly together we sometimes need to delay when we add things.
• Add dense tubers, squashes, grains and anything cut large first.
• Add medium density roots, onions, stalks and anything cut medium-size in the last 1/3 of cook time.
• Add light greens, spices, herbs and anything cut small at the very end of cook time when everything else is finished.
  • Only ever add these in when the heat is completely off. The heat from the other cooked veggies will cook them. Their flavors will adequately steep in the broth after only 2-3 minutes.
• As a rule of thumb, the harder something is to chop, the longer we have to cook it.
• Once everything's fully cooked take it off the heat and leave the lid off! Things will continue to cook even if the heat is off but the lid is left on! We can turn a perfectly cooked dish into overcooked school-cafeteria gruel after only 3-5 minutes of making this fatal error (and believe me, I have!) Light to medium veggies, especially chopped, cook very quickly. Their cook time ranges from 2-10 minutes max.
• We won't be perfect at this at first. We'll sometimes overcook things or undercook things. The more we do it though the better we get in knowing how long things need and when to add them.

2. DON'T chop and/or rinse any veggies when arriving home from shopping.

• Instead, simply cut the bottoms off of any greens and put them in pots of water in the kitchen. They keep longer this way and so it allows us to buy more fresh veg while making fewer grocery trips per month.
  • For root veggies we can place them in a shallow dish (like a pie plate) with water up to 1/2 their lying height and that will keep them crisp.
  • We don't need to pot cabbage, it's almost eternal if we consume it by pulling off its leaves rather than cutting into it (sometimes it's convenient to cut into it though so play it by ear).
  • Roots and cabbage last probably a month or longer. Greens will last a few days to two weeks when potted depending on the green. Everything will last longer if additionally placed in a fridge.
  • Remove only as many greens from the watered pots as needed for cooking that day and rinse & chop them right before use.

3. Swap out oil sauté with water sauté.

• Water sauté is a very convenient, healthy and versatile cooking method. It has essentially zero cleanup compared to oil sauté because there's no oil (duh) and never any charred bits stuck to the bottom of the pan.
• It's basically the same as making a soup but we use a lot less water. The idea is to add water up to 1/2 to 3/4 the height of our largest vegetable chunks.
• The densest vegetables, like squash or potatoes, are placed at the bottom of the pot and the lighter vegetables are placed on top of them (either added at the start of cooking or later on depending on how long they require to cook) where they will be steamed from the shallow water below.

4. Squashes, starches, and legumes are our thickeners.

• Squashes tend to be lighter than starches (though there are some exceptions, like buttercups) but they also tend to have a lot more flavor. They therefore make for excellent flavorful thickeners in a water sauté. Try them all. Butternut, acorn and spaghetti are the most common but we can often find buttercup and delcata seasonally.
• I suspect the current protein craze is very damaging to our health, and is likely fueling cancer growth, and so use legumes more sparingly & occasionally unless we're trying to be a professional bodybuilder—in which case we're probably not the type of person who cares about shaving a decade or two off our lifespan anyway. All must be sacrificed before the altar of gains!

5. Always start cooking a pot of rice at the very start of cooking. (applies to any other grain like barley/buckwheat/quinoa/pre-soaked-beans/etc as well) 

• These generally take longer to cook and starting them early allows them to sync up with the rest of our food.

6. Cook what needs to be cooked rather than what we feel most comfortable cooking.

• Greens starting to wilt? Celery turning yellow and getting floppy? Roots going soft? Spuds starting to sprout? At this stage they're still perfectly edible and nutritious. Instead of throwing them out or letting them go to rot, look at their urgency to be eaten as a creative cooking prompt: How can I prepare and mix these ingredients together to make a delicious dish? We'll often be surprised at what we can come up with.
• It's these opportunities where real growth in the kitchen happens, not from the first nights back from the grocery store. Sometimes we might prepare a dud but those will few & far between and will become increasingly rare as we refine our abilities. I've been saying this for years and it's as true today for me as it was then; we learn the most in our cooking—and get the most creative—right before we go to the supermarket when we've "run out of food".

7. The only reason we should chop things small is if we want them to cook faster.

• Don't make the mistake in thinking we need to chop everything into small pieces to cook it. We can chop things large & coarse, which is a lot less work, and they will still cook just fine that way—though it will take longer.
• Be mindful of how it increases cook times though. We will likely have to delay when we add faster-cooking vegetables.
• The only other minor benefit of chopping things small is we'll save a bit on our energy bill. It requires less overall heat to cook a finer chop.

8. Fresh ginger, garlic, and other WHOLE spices will allow us to completely forget about salt.

• Add these to dishes at the very end, and be liberal with the fresh ginger and/or garlic. It's quite hard to add too much of these two specifically. They often serve as our spice base on which other spices can build on top of.
• Experiment to find the spices we like best and the amounts which are appropriate to add to a dish. Focus on one spice at a time and try to learn it. Taste it by itself. Try to make a few dishes seasoned with only that one spice. The goal is to build a flavor memory of that spice so we will be able to identify it and know what kind of vibe it will contribute when we mix it in with other flavors later on.
• Some spices, like cloves, cardamom, nutmeg, or black pepper, are very potent & distinct and we only want to add them cautiously in small amounts. Other spices are more forgiving to overuse like cumin and coriander (though it's still better to use them judiciously).  Some of my personal favorites are coriander, fennel, rosemary, cinnamon, black pepper, bay leaf, and cumin.

9. Try a new vegetable (or fruit) we've never tried before every month (or every week if we're feeling up to it) and experiment with preparing it in different ways.

• Try cooking it in various ways by itself first, or with few other ingredients, so we build a flavor memory of it which will help inform us on how best to include it in our future meals.
• Try it raw or in a salad, cooked in a soup, steamed, in a water sauté, etc.

10. Make a habit of eating every part of the vegetable that's edible.

• Cooking squash? Leave the seeds in (they're chewy and delicious anyway). Cooking broccoli? Slice up the stalk into discs and throw them too (it's honestly the most flavorful part). Cooking fresh carrots or turnips? Dice up those pretty greens shooting out of their tops into a salad or add them at the end of a water sauté for extra flavor.
• Not only is this usually healthier since we're getting more nutrients from our food but it's also a bit cheaper (we get more food) and requires less preparation & cleanup (no need to be dainty and "clean" everything before adding it).
• The one exception to this is the skins of a lot of vegetables. In an ideal world we'd happily eat these too because they're full of nutrients, but with modern farming practices these parts of the vegetable can often have pesticide & herbicide residues on them. If we do want to eat them then invest in a good scrub brush and scrub them well before cooking. Otherwise, peel them.

Example meal: Buttercup squash with fennel & onions over rice.

1. Start cooking a pot of rice
2. Grab another pot for the veggies
3. Peel half a buttercup squash and slice into large 3-4 inch chunks (this is the hardest part but so worth it)
   1. Add them to the veggie pot
4. Cut an onion in half and slice its exposed underside into 4ths
   1. Add to the veggie pot
5. Cut off the bulb of a fennel stalk, rinse, and slice it into 4-5 cross sections
   1. Add to the veggie pot
6. Fill the pot with water only until it's up to 1/2 to 3/4 the height of the buttercup chunks
7. Bring to a boil and then put the lid on and turn off heat
8. Cut off about half a thumb's worth of fresh ginger root
9. Peel the skin off it with our thumbnail
10. Using our thumbnail again, go around the exterior of the peeled ginger nub and tear off half-centimeter-width strips (or smaller) into a bowl. These strips will come easy if we pull them in the direction of the ginger's grain
11. In the same bowl pour in about 1-2 teaspoons of whole coriander seeds
12. When we no longer hear any rumbling from either the rice pot or the veggie pot, check to see if they're cooked by taking a nibble of the rice and poking the veggies with a spoon. If they're still a bit raw, put the top back on and turn the stove back on until we hear it rumbling again and then turn the heat off again
13. When the rice is soft & cooked, crumple two bay leaves into small pieces over the rice and mix in. Then add 5-8 peppercorns lightly crushed in half (no need to grind) and mix in. Put the lid back on and let them steep.
14. When the veggies are soft & cooked add in our ginger and coriander and mix them in
15. Let the spices steep for 2-3 minutes and it's ready to serve
16. Enjoy and be amazed how rich, satisfying and flavorful this is despite no fat or salt!

Bonus tips:

11. Everything can work with everything, we just need to know the appropriate cook times and amounts.

• This is analogous to music advice you might hear in jazz circles: "There are no wrong notes!" And it's true in cooking as well but it requires a more & more refined flavor palette as we work with stronger and more "exotic" combinations.
• As you increase your flavor memory and cooking experience you'll naturally start to know and get an intuition for how various flavors and textures can be married to one another, even if it might fly in the face of conventional flavor wisdom!

12. Find a decently healthy zero-effort dish to have on hand as a backup, or as a treat, if we either can't cook or just don't feel like cooking that day.

• For me this is oatmeal with flax seeds and fresh fruit or raisins. I just pour some rolled or steel-cut oats, add a spoon or two of flax seeds, add some fruit/raisins, and then add water. I don't even boil the water. Rolled oats soak up water quickly, and steel cut oats just give our jaw a bit of a workout. It's kind of too easy of a meal honestly. I feel like I can easily end up eating too much of it as a result. Better I treat myself with this than cookies or chips though.

13. Try to get fresh, local and organic/veganic if we can but don't beat ourselves up if we can't.

• We should use what's available to us because our increased demand will help drive the change in our community to better freshness & quality of our veg & fruit in the longterm.
• There are certain workarounds to using less fresh foods that I implement myself to this day because I'm not always able to get the highest quality either. Rinse your greens and get a good vegetable scrub brush. If you don't have a scrub brush, peel the produce that you can't rinse (due to a wax coating or something).
• Don't let perfect be the enemy of the good. A low fat, no salt, whole food plant-based diet, even if not fully organic or veganic, is infinitely better than the Standard American Diet and likely far better than any other diet that includes regular consumption of animal products. Make the improvements you can today and don't wait for perfection because it will never arrive.

14. Floss & brush our teeth soon after our last meal to help deter ourselves from idle snacking & overeating.

• If we end up implementing a decent amount of the advice here we'll likely get quite good at cooking after a while and when we become a good cook we'll tend to overeat since we'll always have an abundance of healthy, cheap & tasty food just 15-30 minutes away. To help mitigate this, we can try to eat just one or two meals a day, and after our last meal (when we feel like we've reached our healthy limit) I've found that flossing & brushing my teeth soon after can be enough of a deterrent from continuing to pig out. Nobody wants to floss & brush twice, even if it means we can have just one more bowl!

I hope you found something in this list useful. Thanks for reading and happy cooking!

When you consume more than your body needs, your body uses as much of it as it can, stores the remainder as fat, and then expels any metabolic waste which results from that process.

This basic metabolic cycle should have no issues, under one condition: that there are no parasitic cells within your body.

If there are indeed parasitic cells within your body, how would this metabolic process of use, storage, & expulsion become problematic? Your healthy cells—we'll call these "integrated cells" from now on—will refuse nutrients that they don't need because they function in the service of a higher order than themselves; the homeostasis of your body. On the other hand, parasitic cells will never refuse any nutrients provided to them because they have a far more simple ambition; they exist only to consume more nutrients and grow themselves larger.

Now that we've defined the nature of these two categories of cells, integrated & parasitic, what distinguishes modern lifestyles from lifestyles which came before them where cancer was less prevalent? We consistently consume more than we require.

The nutrients you consume will be absorbed by your small intestine and then enter your bloodstream where your heart will pump them throughout your entire body. These nutrients can be freely taken in and absorbed by any cells hungry for them as they float by like a river delivery system. Remember though, your integrated cells don't take any nutrients if they feel "full" & satiated. Integrated cells don't have any desire to expand or be more than they are. They are satisfied to just exist to perform their small, but necessary, function for your body.

Let's suppose now that you feel full after eating some food and your integrated cells are all well-nourished. What happens if you eat past this point? Those nutrients floating through your bloodstream aren't being taken in by any of your integrated cells because none of them are hungry. What happens to those excess nutrients then? Well, if there aren't any parasitic cells in your body then they will eventually be taken in by your body's storing mechanisms which will turn as many of them into fat as it can and then expel everything it can't.

What if one of your cells—either through trauma, ingestion of toxins, or just plain bad luck—DID mutate into a parasitic, self-replicating cell though? Because this type of cell has no bottom to its appetite, it will be able to absorb a near-endless supply of those free-floating nutrients in your bloodstream before they can get converted to fat or waste because most of your integrated cells will have refused them due to not being hungry. Surplus nutrients are an all-you-can-eat buffet for parasitic cells—and they get first dibs.

In summary, these parasitic cells create a bottomless "hole" in our system, vacuuming up many of the excess nutrients that we consume before they can be stored. I believe this is the fatal cause of the rise of cancer in the modern day. While we may be exposed to more traumas & toxins today which are capable of triggering parasitic cell mutations, and this certainly is a factor as well, it's only through consistent over-consumption of nutrients that these mutations are able to survive and then eventually grow. Mutations load the gun but chronic overconsumption pulls the trigger.

I think what these activists are doing is extremely brave. I also think this open rescue strategy is creative and it will be interesting to see what change they're able to effect with it.

Some may criticize this strategy, like all strategies can be criticized, but it's undeniable the amount of hustle this group is exerting in the service of animal liberation.

If for no other reason than that, and their willingness to literally put their lives on the line to effect this change, I fully support their efforts.

If you feel similarly, consider donating to their organization. The money seems very well spent:

https://blog.simpleheart.org/subscribe

What if they ate the shreds though?

Hey everyone! I'm u/medium_wall, a founding moderator of r/liberationist.

This is a home for all things related to animal & environmental rights movements. We're excited to have you join us!

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Post anything as long as you can trace a relation to the topic of "liberation from exploitation." Topics related to degrowth & environmentalism are also welcome.

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Lax moderation. We prioritize your ability to speak your true & unfiltered thoughts. You may use any language or tone which feels most natural to you, however, if you venture into the controversial it must be rooted in genuine sincerity or an identifiably productive purpose. This allowance for controversy is not a freedom from challenge or criticism, it's only a promise that your contributions will not be rudely, unthinkingly & wastefully deleted in the service of propriety or conventional wisdom alone. Please message the mods if you feel this value has been violated for you.

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1. Introduce yourself in the comments below.
2. Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.
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4. Interested in helping out? We're always looking for new moderators, so feel free to reach out to me to apply.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let's make r/liberationist amazing!

[Edit: reddit doesn't preserve the timestamp in links, the quote from the title is at 9:05]

Coyotes are opportunistic omnivores. Like all wildlife they have a role in their ecosystems. The vast majority of predation that occurs in the wild is enacted on dying, diseased and generally unfit animals, NOT the most strong, virile and healthy specimens as the mentally & emotionally stunted homo-hunter prefers to target.

I like coyotes and I think they're a net good to our movement. They're a huge PITA to people who hostage genetically mutilated hens in their backyard for egg-laying or who raise cows or sheep for their flesh, skin or secretions. This raises the cost of these grisly "commodities".

We have no need, absolutely zero, for humans to be hunting in order to "manage" animal populations. Nature solved this puzzle millions of years ago in a far more efficient & ethical way in the form of predator animals. Animals like coyotes, wolves, mountain lions, etc, "give mercy" to those animals having a tough time in the demanding conditions of the wild, while leaving alone the healthiest specimens to propagate more freely. This elevates the entire ecosystem to be the most healthy, efficient and adaptable it can be.

Always remember that hunting in the West is a practice engaged in, near-exclusively, by the most privileged among us. It is not a "salt of the earth" profession in any way. It's an occupation done not out of necessity but entertainment. When hunters feel comfortable you will always hear them say how much "fun" they're having in taking another's life and disrupting an ecosystem. It's not about food, it is and will always be about sport.

Do not ever give respect to this depravity.

For those who want to go a bit deeper, here's a great recent coyote documentary that gives more info on this very misunderstood animal from a diversity of perspectives, including wildlife advocates:

Coywolf: Investigating the eastern coyote hunting controversy in Vermont