I think it would have been fair to have a rule saying "no surgical modifications"... because doing things like facelift, nose-job, breast/buttox implants, cheek lifts, wrinkle removal, etc, are obviously unfair advantages (in a beauty contest) for those who have the money pay for it; and having a generic blanket rule like that would have accomplished the same thing they were trying to accomplish without being so blatantly transphobic... so a rule like what they have only proves that they are both despicable AND dumb. The entire notion of beauty pageants is outdated and stupid if you ask me.

This crucially important caveat they snuck in there:

"Prof Scarborough said: “Cherry-picking data on high-impact, plant-based food or low-impact meat can obscure the clear relationship between animal-based foods and the environment."

...which is an interesting way of saying that lines get blurry depending on the type of meat diet people had and/or the quantity vs the type of plant-based diet people had.

Takeaway from the article shouldn't be meat=bad and vegan=good - the takeaway should be that meat can be an environmentally responsible part of a reasonable diet if done right and that it's also possible for vegan diets to be more environmentally irresponsible.

1 'hole' if you can call it that. Imagine if the straw started life as a solid cylinder and you had to bore out the inside to turn it into a straw: if that were the case, you would drill 1 hole all the way through it.

Another analogy is a donut. Would you agree that a donut has just 1 hole? I would say yes. Now stretch that donut vertically untill you have a giant cylinder with a hole in the middle. That's basically now just a straw. The fact you stretched it doesn't increase the number of holes it has.

Brandolini's law, aka the "bullshit asymmetry principle" : the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.

Unfortunately, with the advent of large language models like ChatGPT, the quantity of bullshit being produced is accelerating and is already outpacing the ability to refute it.

A lot of community types just simply don't work without a minimum critical mass of members.

Imagine asking a programming question on a software development community of just 5 people. You end up with 3 people who aren't active enough to see the question, 1 person sees but doesn't have an answer and doesn't respond (classic lurker), and one person sees it and responds that they don't know the answer. Now imagine a community of 5 thousand people...it's suddenly much more feasible to even bother asking the question.

Sure, fediverse could exist with just 5 people, but it would be worthless and pointless.

they do not discriminate against people who are “too young”.

This is a misrepresentation of what was said. Was that intentional? It sounds like you are trying to inject your own opinion into what you are presenting as factual and unbiased.

The actual quote I think you are referring to is:

That means no adult on our instance is too thin, fat, bald, masculine, old, young, cis, gay, etc., to be sexy, and that includes not discriminating against legal adults that look younger than people think they should. Everyone has a right to lust and to be lusted after.

I've highlighted some key words I think you missed.

Like any kind of contest, finding rules violations is hard and not foolproof. It's like sports that forbid using steroids - competitors do regularly take those substances while training, then quit taking them for competition and go uncaught. Competitors who are discovered later to have been violating rules are stripped of titles.

That said, I don't think it's a very controversial concept that a beauty pageant shouldn't be a contest about who could afford the best surgeons. Well - as I said earlier I think beauty pageants are absurd to begin with, but if they have to exist I don't think it should be a contest between surgeons.

When I first saw the ads, it sounded dumb and I didn't give it any more thought - I just had no interest in it. But like the author of that article, the more I read/hear about it, the more interested I am in it - especially since it seems to be pissing off all the very same demographics who cause the majority of our modern problems. I'm not sure if I'm willing to pay theater prices to see it, but I'll definitely watch it when it becomes rentable via some streaming services.

It's funny, because my wife and I were just talking about it last night - and she'd mentioned some of this very same stuff.

It would be an inconceivably-massive statistical anomaly if they didn't. But I think a better question is will we ever make contact, and I think the answer to that is that it's inconceivably improbable.

What users are voluntarily pro-spez (and by voluntarily, I mean their paychecks aren't jeopardized by dissention)?

I have met plenty of anti-spez users, and I have met plenty of users who just DNGAF, but I have yet to meet a single actual bona fide user who is 'pro-spez'.

Did you create the attached photo? If so, then I disagree with most of your labeling...and call some of it into question as outright denial of reality.

The world cannot be all puppies and unicorns. But, if that's what you need it to be, there are communities that will serve that purpose and all you need to do is subscribe to those and only browse subscribed.

If you attempt to pressure a witness to destroy evidence...is that witness tampering, evidence tampering, or some other kind of crime? Regardless, throw that one onto the mountain of unprosecuted felony crimes that he's committed.

If it's trained on previous community interaction, it's just going to automatically tell people (in the rudest way possible) their question is a duplicate and kill the thread for each and every new post.

It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. Take the city of Seattle, for example (I know this because I planned an executed a nude photo shoot in public view inside the city limits and sought legal council ahead of time to ensure I wan't risking being charged with any crimes). The general rule for Seattle hinges on whether the activity is intended to tittilate or sexually arouse observers - and if that is obviously not the intent, then even full nudity is not illegal. Many other large cities have very similar ordinances.

The smaller the town, and the more conservative the region, the stricter and less flexible the ordinances. There are beaches in South Carolina, for example, where they even regulate the minimum amount of coverage for bikinis and beachware.

She wouldn’t have been any better than drumpf

Hard disagree.

Most likely, Hillary just wouldn't have accomplished much of anything (and not so much for lack of agenda or effort but because of the unprecedented amount of rightwing/conservative resistance put up for everything she would have attempted. But at worst, it would just have been business as usual for another 4 years. Trump has actually turned the country, the executive branch, the judicial branch, national safety, the economy, and the environment into a continent-sized dumpster fire that will burn for decades. Hillary wouldn't have done that.

Hillary's greatest sin was coming into the 2016 election as if she'd already won...as if she -deserved- to win....as if it was pre-ordained...and that really rubbed people the wrong way. Being a woman didn't help - half this country are a few IQ points away from neanderthals who don't believe women are capable of leading a nation, so that didn't help either.

The democratic party also deserves much of the blame- they were going to shit on Bernie and promote Hillary regardless of what the common voters wanted...because they had the power to do that and they were willing to exercise that power. So fuck them too.

(if it's not obvious, I thought Bernie was the clear superior choice also)

First, always start by reading the public modlog. Mod logs are public.

Next: how about an example? I'm not seeing what you describe, so I'd really appreciate a reference (link) to whatever it is you are describing.

The bigger a social platform gets, the more synergy it spawns. That's what adds utility to a social platform.

I don't think anyone here wants it to be 'the next big thing', but I do think a lot of people (myself included) want to see it become 'one of the next big things'. As in...we want it to become big enough to be a viable alternative to the proprietary walled-garden corporate establishments that have become the current standard.

More choice = better, and for as long as this platform remains small and elitist (referring back to your 3rd sentence), it will never truly be a viable choice. There's still a lot of engagement I'm required to use Reddit for - and I hate that - and the only reason for it is we just don't have the community size needed (yes, it's getting closer every day) to be that viable alternative.

There's a lot of content I'm just not into - and I happily block those communities. But I would never want to inflict my own likes & dislikes on others. So I think a move like this is unenlightened.

But, I also think there needs to be an instance that fits everyone, and if lemmy.blahaz.zone wants to be the morality-police instance for their users, and their users like that, then more power to them.

Twitter was tanking before threads came along. All meta did was read the writing on the wall and release threads on the world with exceptional timing.

That apology is so full of shit I can smell it from here. I hope the prosecutor sees right through it.