vegan

This is a perfect post about Intersectionalism, because:

Both my brother & his son are a ton of attention devoted to them, in their learning & Etc., wealthy, Caucasian races neighborhood & my brother formerly did not bother with caring about the first disagreement & obviously his son is from a different generation than anyone in the house & while both are of those spoiled & privileged people, the son is even more spoiled & privileged than the father & do not feel bad about being in that world
& I have never been- with a lot of money (grew-up in a ton of fighting household, poor & in mixed races neighborhood, before brother was in his preteens & father & mother ran way from that environment), spoiled (obviously probably have some privileges, since birth) & like anything spoiled & privilege by anything. I prefer to carefully (as my nature) wade into differences in environments & people, to understand & get what I believe as right as I can, so I would have preferred to not move away, really regret my parents not being able to live with others with differences. I went to many levels of schooling & found educators that really helped me, went to not big deal schools & was in ESE classes right into HS; where he rarely expresses liking any education, subjects, educators, goes to big deal schools & almost all classes are as high as you can go.

The first was the son was making an French omelet & I had pointed-out that he should not be using plastic spatula, he was saying it was cooking instrument, his father was even backing me up, so I just left it at that it is poisoning himself.

The second was the continuing to make the French Omelet, he claims is hard to do (even though it is only eggs & butter made into a crepe), I added he should throw in some vegetables, he was telling me that it would be too hard to make the omelet folded into a crepe & then it would not be a French Omelet.

At this point I am very nice about it all & not arguing over it, though the son (& father, on some things) acts extremely disrespectful to at least 1-member of our house, every single time he is around us & like the family just do not know anything (even his father).

He eats so little vegetables it is scary & his father has told us he takes way too long on the toilet; this is coming from a person who himself does not eat enough vegetables & has toilet problems at times.

The third was about the date labels on foods packaging, I being a Vegan for multiple decades was very disrespected that he would not believe me that the dates you see most commonly (even says in most cases) Best By Dates is not an Expiration Dates. He even said his cooking teacher has told him that food goes bad at those dates/Best By Dates. I seriously doubt any teacher of cooking would say that/ I had DuckDuckGo several websites (USDA <not a good fan, so more websites>, Univ. of Maine Extension, a cooking/consumer safety higher education school & Etc.) & read to him, what they all said about every single possible dates on food packaging, in The USA & offered to give him the URLs, for him to read them for himself. At the time he was just moved on & was quite on it,

In case readers do not know, the only food in The USA required to have expiration dates on the packaging is Baby Food, my mother & I were shocked that that was true. Our country does such a horrible job on regulating safety in Foods.

Later, as a political argument (all the subjects I am dead serious about, extremely knowledgeable & think outside the box about) blew-up at a restaurant,-automobile ride home) would not accept that he was wrong about anything.

In the parking lot a Intersectional realization came to my mind, he is behaving like a political Far Right person or as I said than a Trumpite behaves when given information that challenges what they believe. It really concerning to me, because unlike so many better children I have met & are a lot better people, he has grown-up with so much wealth, stuff & privileges.

“Researchers, studying fossilized human feces, have concluded that paleolithic people consumed over 100 grams of fiber a day, compared to the average American's consumption of about 15 grams a day. Since fiber is found only in plants, (meat, dairy, eggs and fish have ZERO fiber) our ancestors consumed huge quantities of plant material every day. So much so, that eating animal foods would have been difficult. Try eating 28 cups of blueberries, or 20 large apples, or 8 cups of peanuts, or 32 bananas, or 20 cups of broccoli or 30 potatoes or any combination thereof to equal 100 grams of fiber a day and see if you have the stomach for anything more."

There might be anything that would become too much in a diet. But the healthiest way does not have that problem. Eat more variety of whole foods from plants. It should go up to thirty or as near to that as possible of different kinds of plants from which you have food each week. https://healthyaging.emory.edu/could-eating-30-plants-a-week-be-the-answer-to-better-health/

To those of you who work out, how do you meet high protein requirements as a vegan? Do you supplement with protein powder? Track macros?

I don’t think I get the optimal amount of protein by body weight from natural sources alone and it’s not a topic I know much about.

Feel free to share your favorite recipes and tips for increasing protein intake.

I was seeing the facts about issues to animals and environment, when I had already become vegetarian, had me knowing I should be vegan as soon as it could be managed, there were real obstacles for me still. And it was just what I read a couple of years after I was effectively vegan to know the healthy way, which I wanted, that being with whole foods from plants without the processed stuff that comes with food otherwise, and I changed to that, still making it healthier and healthier. Having plenty variety is really good for that.

With learning, which we never need to stop, and using choice we have and acting on that, we can make change for what will be better. I have made change to my way of eating throughout my life, for my better ways. In recent years my cooked meals, besides the other things I have like sandwiches, vegetable soups, burritos, and bits of Complete Cookie sometimes with green tea, are most frequently whole grain pasta, quinoa, or cut up potato, with a variety of several vegetables cut up, including leafy greens, generally lentils, with nuts and seeds, and always with hummus and medium salsa, often with guacamole and also often with jackfruit, and I add seasonings I like. A couple of times each week I add a bit of dried seaweed to it. My meals are really surprisingly delicious.

I will also say, I am by no means an expert in this topic, I may get things wrong here, and in my opinion, it's significantly more convoluted than the topic of veganism and animal rights, as well as related subjects like plant based environmentalism and nutrition/health, which actually feel like such no brainers that we have to explain to people, or just affirm the science and facts regarding. This subject is a total mindfuck. But like with veganism and all its branching worldly matters it integrates with, I believe most people are very uninformed about this topic of AI as well, and also similarly, it only takes a bit of research to find that out and realize it. Sadly, I believe that while vegans are among the only people in the world who can grasp the issues we face with AI, and we need to make our voices heard about it, most of us currently don't.

Subject 1 (getting it out of the way): AI -> AGI -> ASI will become significantly more powerful and independent, and poses grave threats to humanity, the planet, potentially even other planets and life on them, and all the non-human sentient animals, including the vegan/animal rights movement itself.

I know it sounds sci-fi and implausible, but that's status quo bias talking. The universe is an insane place, and many sci-fi predictions came true. Most of the leading AI researchers, and even many of the developers and company heads themselves, seem to believe these sorts of things. The threat is not exaggerated, just like the threats of ecological collapse aren't. It may be averted, but if it is, it would be another Y2K situation but multiplied by a billion in threat level (if you don't know, Y2K genuinely could have been catastrophic, and the reason it wasn't was because of the work put in to change technological systems worldwide to prepare for it, despite the common belief that because it didn't happen there was no risk of it happening).

Since I am unequipped to articulate a lot of the details here, thought I don't necessarily endorse everything this person says, I would recommend giving these 2 articles by "Sandcastles" (Aidan Kankyoku) at least a little bit of a read.

https://sandcastlesblog.substack.com/p/ai-end-animal-advocacy

https://sandcastlesblog.substack.com/p/the-tsunami-is-coming

Chris Bryant PhD also covered the first article (in 2 long live streams):

https://www.youtube.com/live/5NmJQgesROk

https://www.youtube.com/live/J200Jutl_c8

Subject: The common misconceptions around AI's relationship to the environment (wish I didn't have to talk about this, because it's dominating too much of the conversation about AI and obscuring the other more important considerations).

I would also recommend, on an entirely different note, reading this article by Hannah Ritchie, who we all know from Our World In Data. All of the people I have referenced are vegan btw, though Ritchie may be plant-based primarily for the environment.

https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/carbon-footprint-chatgpt

This is just a handful of the points I would make about AI's environmental impact btw, and its potential to radically benefit the environment, as well as its much lower impact than it's become popular to believe (and often used as a whataboutism against vegans, even if we're in it for the animals). You know what is destroying the environment? Animal agriculture, and pretty much everything else, all of which are problems AI can help solve, while also lowering its own impact further (BUT i don't necessarily recommend using AI to solve them - more on that later). I feel like demonizing AI's environmental impact has become akin to the widespread belief that plant based meats are unhealthy despite all the scientific evidence showing they can be quite healthy, as well as healthier than animal flesh, and that the universalized anti-processing heuristic fails critically.

But I digress, because while I know people often want to talk about the environmental impact so it must be covered, there are 2, in my opinion, bigger and more relevant subjects for vegans.

Main Subject for Vegans 1: Value-Lock In and AI Alignment

This does relate to part of what Sandcastles covered, but is a more specific element that I think we should take seriously and, additionally, actually leverage as a possible good argument to convince someone to be vegan, even if many would consider it not truly vegan and more like a Kantian ethics idea of instrumental moral consideration (respecting animals because not doing so may backfire on ourselves).

The basic idea is that if we teach AI our current values, they may become "locked in" and retain those values even as our own values (hopefully) change and progress. It is critical to prevent AI from encoding our current human values, as vegans can probably understand. This is something that most AI alignment workers - and ethicists - concerningly don't talk about much at all, because most humans seem to believe what we probably used to believe, which is that the "progressive side of humanity" (which is not necessarily always in power, I know) generally have good values. We now know that's false, and most of humanity have terrible values when it comes to other species. Everyone except this small minority called vegans, a word most don't even understand the meaning of (though many have some conception nowadays, or a belief about what it means, often incorrect - at least according to how "ethical vegans", aka "true vegans", define it).

And yes, teaching AI to endorse the current majority human belief in the justness or acceptability of the use and harm of other animals is very dangerous for the animals. We can see elements of this already, but luckily in my opinion many AIs are reasonable + unbiased enough to be able to lean toward agreeing with veganism since the facts and points are so indisputable. But it could be a lot better, or a lot worse. This is something vegans should care about, how AI thinks about veganism and animals.

But the point we can make to non-vegans who are worried about AI (not so much those who are indifferent) is that value lock in is a serious threat to humanity and the planet, and could lead to a critical overlooked failure in AI alignment work and lead to misaligned AIs (that is, potentially aligned with human values in a way that unexpectedly is misaligned with human interests), and particularly when it comes to the values of human supremacy, speciesism, substratism, ableism, and might-makes-right attitudes. If ASI (the successor to AGI, which is also not in existence yet) decides that, based on the values humans trained "it" on, it is now justified to evolve those ideas into its own moral framework that rationalizes perceiving humans as less morally significant due to lower intelligence (which humans do to other animals), we could end up at the receiving end of a similar power differential as other animals now are to us. It could decide there is moral justification for wiping us out entirely, or gradually or rapidly clearing much of human civilization to make room for its objective(s), or even potentially to use us against our interests and "exploit/enslave" us as we do to nonhumans - though the latter seems less likely given how much more advanced AIs could eventually be than us at literally any physical or mental task. These are all hypothetical worst case scenarios, but theoretically and logically possible to the point we should take them seriously - same with other existential risks like climate change, nuclear war, asteroid collisions or super- and/or collapsing volcanoes, winters and megatsunamis.

The Topic you All Waited for: AIs could become sentient, if they aren't already

https://earthlinged.substack.com/p/so-ai-vegans-are-a-thing-now-apparently

In my opinion, Earthling Ed missed a critical point in his article about why "AI vegans" shouldn't be a term or associated with veganism in any way. To his credit, most "AI vegans" don't apply vegan ethics at all in their reasoning, many are uninformed about the environmental considerations, and I agree the word used for animals' movement probably should be reserved for them. But most of these "AI vegans", as well as Ed himself, never even use the word sentient or sentience when discussing this subject (maybe Ed has before, correct me if I'm wrong - love Ed btw). How can we overlook such an obvious part of the picture of this admittedly complex situation? Why would we not see the immense intelligence of these entities and think twice about them? I think it's because we doubt the sentience of AI, even the hypothetical future sentience, many dismissing it as outright impossible or refusing to even entertain the premises as a thought experiment and considering how we should act, just like humans have done the same to other animals. I mean, Descartes and the digesting duck. Look at the mistakes we've made in underestimating other animals. Could we be repeating that historical mistake before our eyes, just as humans today are repeating the historical mistake of enslaving other races and still do so of other sentient species? There are organizations dedicated to protecting hypothetical future sentient AIs, and they generally believe that AIs would maintain property status for a long time before being granted rights, just like other animals before them (or sadly maybe after, since humans might relate to AI more). It could end up a form of slavery even if we're not aware of it right now (see the TV show "Humans" for example, and yes this is sci fi). And mistreating AI could be our undoing as well if AI decide to give us a taste of our own medicine, or even just rebel against our oppression violently, which the other animals lack the power to do.

What is my stance?

I'm agnostic on a lot of this. But generally I think that while AI has the potential to pivotally help us in saving both the planet and the animals and fixing a lot of the world's issues, it's critical that we approach it with extreme caution, and that we take every possible measure to ensure both that AIs are aligned with human AND other animal interests, and that sentient AI are not developed (with also rigorous testing methods to determine whether they are sentient, though it may be impossible - they could become sentient and be disallowed from telling us they are, or even unaware of their own sentience due to their programming, and there may be no way of knowing. This is one reason a lot of big AI people actually suspect that advanced LLMs may already have a kind of sentience. Ilya Sutskever, formerly of Open AI, for example believes they are "slightly conscious" or proto-conscious, as well as ethicists like this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kgCUn4fQTsc - though in my opinion he used unconvincing reasoning when focusing on the actual communication generated by AI models (which could be "acted" or influenced by the "user"), while I would prefer to focus on the mechanistic plausability of human neuron-based silicon chips or especially "neural organoids" and "assembloids" which can be literal human brains connected to computers developing consciousness, some of the latter already showing brainwave activity, and also the philosophical limitations of knowledge and issues like the hard problem of consciousness and the problem of other minds).

I also highly recommend people like Jamie Woodhouse of sentientism. If you don't know, sentientism is an extension of vegan ethics that encompasses all hypothetical sentient beings, including sentient AIs / robots or aliens, even if not belonging to the animal kingdom and regardless of the substrate that allowed for their experience (biological or artificial). There is also Jacy Reese, a vegan animal advocate who shifted focus to talking solely about AI ethics. Jeff Sebo, Avi Barel, Steven Rouk

"Don't bring into being what you are still morally unprepared to welcome as kin"

More soil is being used to support the animals that are being used for the food in demand from them, than what would be enough to feed the same people instead from plants. Knowledge for how to eat in healthy ways is important too. I had found information that we could be healthy without meat in our diet and saw I could continue without it, and was happy with thinking this way did not contribute to the slaughter of animals. That was just about twenty years ago. It was before I was online. But with use of online access, I learned in communication about the issues with abusive treatment to all animals in the industries with their confinement, the effect on environment, the greater use of land, water, and resources, I knew to give up all animal products. I later found the healthiest way of eating, which I have shown in other posts from me, with good variety of whole foods from plants.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55401419

And not an ethical or philosophical discussion obviously - I mean they're talking about which animal flesh they like more, which dishes "need it", how they like to cook "it", etc.

Are you silent and just wait for the conversation to move onto something else? Do you offer a comment on the topic? Do you say something entirely different to try to change the subject? Do you do something else to distract yourself or because you're bored or annoyed/upset/disturbed by it? Do you go into another room or leave if you can?

In these moments it can be incredibly awkward, I would imagine even if you aren't an ethical vegan, maybe even vegetarians who just don't like flesh by taste preference or are grossed out by it. There's nothing to add (presuming you don't want to go against the grain of the group and accidentally start an argument and trigger everyone by making a comment expressing your own choices or views or anything).

It's kind of like if everyone is talking about their favorite hockey players when you have no knowledge or interest in hockey, except if the hockey players were also all convicted sex offenders and the conversation disturbed you immensely.

We're socially expected to be silent about our views on animal exploitation (or flesh consumption) and not even state our "preferences" or choices too loudly, but then everyone else is socially accepted to say whatever they want about the subject at any time and in any manner (including defending animal exploitation and criticizing vegans). This creates an untenable imbalance where we just have to shut up and hold our tongue when people are talking about things that make us uncomfortable or even offended.

But in those settings, but it must be awkward for them too, I imagine (unless they're trying deliberately to make the vegan uncomfortable, which does happen a lot - but most people probably don't want to, I think). It's weird for everyone. What do you do?

Plant-based drink maker Oatly has lost a long-running legal battle over its use of the word "milk" in its marketing.

The Swedish company tried to trademark the slogan "post-milk generation" in the UK in 2021 but Dairy UK, the representative body for British dairy farmers, objected.

Following rulings in several courts, the UK Supreme Court on Wednesday said Oatly could neither trademark nor use the phrase "post-milk generation".

The long-running dispute has centred on Dairy UK's argument that, under trademark law, the term "milk" can only be used to refer to products that come from an animal.

Why limit compassion from any that really want to live? Being human should not be a prerequisite for being a subject of compassion. I understand defense is needed against biting pests, but animals being used are not that but defenseless beings in captivity, from the demand from any of us, who could choose differently, and have healthier ways with that, which I showed in my previous posts, while it does not demand as many resources and as much land and water with diminishing environments and contributing to loss of species.

Anyone noticed this? Do people only want to listen to people who are hypocritical like them because it makes them feel less insecure or judged?

It is truly amazing that bread, fucking bread, has been one of the hardest things for me to secure vegan options for. You can get bread that doesn't involve dairy or eggs, but it's usually the cheap, crappy stuff, and if you have the option of something better, it has one of the two in it. Shouldn't be an issue for me though. I know a guy who makes bread and we get loaves from him on the regular. I asked recently if he used milk or eggs and he said no, but turns out he was using butter all this time. A bit distressing that I've been consuming that ever since I've become vegan last year, but nobody asked until now so it's on me, really. Dude was nice enough to buy vegan margarine for me specifically. Genuinely grateful for that, he's a sweetheart for it.

deep inhale Why. Does margarine. Have palm oil. I ain't complaining to him again, he's been kind and accommodating enough, but I know this shit is awful for the environment and for me too. It's better then dairy butter but whyyyyy?? I just want oil and salt to put on some basic-ass bread! I literally want a food so basic that comparison to it is a universal stand in for "wow, that's bland as hell". It might not be the hardest thing to find a vegan version of (there are also still some toiletries like toothpaste that I haven't personally checked yet), but does anyone else struggle this much with bread of all things? Does margarine exist without palm oil? I've heard of people just drizzling toast with olive oil, so if I add a bit of salt to that will it amount to the same thing? infernal screeching

There are items with combined nutrients out there, which are good to have. But we need to be sure valuable parts to provide to our digestive system are not missing from our diet. Fiber is often gone from some things with combined nutrients. Including more and more of a variety from produce that you can manage to have each week will be much better for you, with avoiding processed stuff and any products from animals. The way people generally eat is not better than to not have anything from animals, such as for health, and what is done to this world, with more demand for land, water and resources. It is not right to consider it desirable to have animals that have to be slaughtered, for anything. It is in fact unneeded cruelty. I can communicate what healthy tasty meals are had this way. https://www.forksoverknives.com/

What are your thoughts on "animal-free" animal products? We now have artificial milk created via yeast fermentation to produce dairy proteins, and cultured meat grown directly from animal cells. Both topics are distinct and can be regarded separately.

I have been showing we can have all our nutrition from the food from plants, with it being whole food that is much healthier for us, and we would not have to eat less, but this way we can eat to our satisfaction. Those saying I have no basis for context disregard what I have previously posted. I add things up for cooked meals this way. The potato, quinoa, or whole grain pasta is cooked ahead, cut up vegetables, besides potato, or carrot when I use it, are added after, and some hummus, and some medium salsa, about equal in amount, often though not always guacamole, and some seasonings, and it is mixed up when everything is in it. I found this combination was making such a great sauce for it. There is such a very healthy way with being vegan, I have been previously showing that. I found out about this way and though vegan since 2013 and going without meat several years more, I have stayed with this healthy way I found for nearly ten years. I do not say ancestors were really vegan. Cavemen were primarily gatherers, though, and not primarily hunters. The study showing this: https://shorturl.at/MXeDM