Check out the instances that have defederated with the radicalized ones? I hang out in 2 Lemmy instances, still working to finish migrating from here to the other.

With the exception of a few of the “grad” communities, Lemmy has just been a whole lot less toxic. I don’t deny occasionally slipping back into reddit for exactly two subs that don’t seem to have any chance of taking off in Lemmy. But Lemmy has really killed my reddit urge permanently. Every time I enter reddit, I see a message trolling or attacking me or whatever.

I’m not sure you know what you’re arguing. You seemed to get really defensive when I said we should reduce the police. So I explained why it is smart to reduce the police.

It’s a knee-jerk reaction for people who have experienced criminal behavior to want more police and harsher sentencing. Often times it helps to shake them out of it to discuss efficacy. To ask “what if more police and harsher sentencing doesn’t work, or has the opposite effect?” Ultimately, you seem to want the same thing as me - less crime, less violent crime. So why not support things that are more likely to work over things that are less likely to work?

Even if you cut the budget in half you are going to have a really hard time funding and finding people like social workers that want to do that job at 3am.

You’re not going to have a hard time finding/training social workers, and they tend to make less than half of what police officers do in most states. They actually spiked really high unemployment rates a few times, and the low demand and low wages of social work is the only thing keeping people from pivoting to that field. You are right about one thing. Social workers are actually required to be properly trained, unlike police (who often don’t even know the law they’re supposedly enforcing). But I guarantee if the funding showed up, the workers would as well.

There is a part 2 to that of course. There are a lot of people who would more readily spend $1b in police than $1m in social work because “poor people don’t deserve anything for free”. But you talked like you care about violent crimes not happening, and you aren’t getting that by maintaining the current huge police spend.

I am getting crushed because I said not all cops are monsters I definitely think the system needs to change.

I don’t like the term “crushed”. I expanded upon you saying “Cool let’s not have cops” with pointing out the value of changing from a police-oriented society to a solution-oriented society. Your points were:

1. With fewer police, crime will go unsolved, to which I pointed out that only a tiny percent of police are tasked with solving crimes and pointing out that “solving crimes” means we failed to prevent those crimes from happening

2. That you’ve seen horrible things, therefore we need to support police. To which I tried to dismantle that and show you that the police did not, and do not, prevent those horrible things from happening, including referencing (without citation I’m afraid. I was tired/lazy) studies that showed reduction in police funding does not actually increase crime rates.

I’m sure other people are giving you more harsh replies, but I’m sticking to just the facts of the situation. In most (but not all) situations, the need for police represents failure by society to do something, something they could have done cheaper without the police. The #1 such failure is insufficient welfare and safety nets, that benefit far more per-dollar to reduce crime than police ever will.

A small “response” crew dealing with volitile situations like a domestic disturbance being escalated beyond the scope of a social worker, and a smaller “combat” crew dealing with things like hostage situations and ultra-high-risk situations… that’s mostly all the police need/do that could effectively protect us. Hell, you don’t even need a guy with a gun to handle most common infractions like DUIs.

You do understand that solving the world’s carbon energy crisis is not an individual person’s job, right? We’re not talking about me and you getting a solar lease in lieu of nuclear. We’re talking about spending about 10% of the cost of 100% nuclear to build 100% solar and wind. For startup costs, going 100% renewable is literally orders of magnitude cheaper than going nuclear. And most countries have the space of potential for it. Yes, as I mentioned elsewhere, building power in and around cities is more complicated, but that is where roof units can come in. It is estimated that any major city could be self-sufficient if every building in it had solar panels on the roof and storage batteries. Even at the higher cost of smaller scale builds, the price difference between solar and nuclear is so large that a municipal solar grid is downright cheap, even if it has to be built that way. And it’s pretty cool how effectively it would mitigate large-scale power outages as a free bonus.

Please understand, most people who oppose nuclear do so for more reasons than the nuclear waste. They hate that people keep focusing on this expensive technology that will take too long to solve the problem, when we have renewable energy that is just so much cheaper to build.

What do you do for work, and how much time do you spend in depressed areas?

I grew up adjacent to two cities with some of the highest crime rates in the US. The one that went easier on the cops and heavier on local programs and improvements had its crime rate plummet. The one that doubled-down on policing still has a gang problem (and drug OD problem) today. The former had the higher crime rate, including a street that hit the top 10 deadliest streets in the country.

As for what I do, immaterial. But I live with emergency workers, and they are saints who put their lives at risk every day. They also don’t like cops, but are afraid to say it because cops can fuck up their lives. Yes, sometimes they need cops for the direct prevention of a violent situation (see my point below), but as often the cops get in their way. They are required to obey a lawful order even when they’re doing their job, and sometimes that costs a patient’s life. Very often, accountability on that is more politics than justice.

I have seen babies shaken to death mothers cutting their wrists while their children are in the next room, people placing gasoline bombs in banks around town, a guy set his ex wife’s house on fire with her in it, a guy shot in the stomach for the cash in his register, a pregnant woman stabbed in the belly 9 times by a stalker abd Countless other awful things and for these reasons I am glad cops are working

How many of those didn’t happen because of the cops’ presence? The math (see below) says zero of them. If you could be confident that 50% defunding police and replacing them with social programs would cut the rate of those things substantially, what would your opinion be? More crime and more thugs to punish it, or less crime?

I’d like to take note that everything you said in your last reply might be appropriate if I were some punk kid saying “let’s get rid of all the cops in the world” or somesuch. I’m saying let’s stop funding them beyond their need and stop trusting them to do the things they are not qualified for. Of all the horrible things you’ve seen, police still cause more deaths than they prevent, committing 5% of homicides themselves… while police budget and saturation does not have any detectable correlation to homicide figures. That means, $1 spent on policing causes a net increase to homicide rates.

Again, that’s NOT saying those figures would stay the same if we cut 90% or 95% or 100% of police funding, but they sure as hell would if we cut 30% or 40%, and if we reallocated that into programs that DO solve those problems? We have those programs. They’re just underfunded by people who don’t think we deserve free mental healthcare, free food, etc. EVERY $1 that goes into welfare does more to cut crimes than $1 into police.

Honestly, I’m not super married to the idea of “solving” crimes. I would rather prevent 1 crime than solve 2. The idea that solving crimes is more important than preventing them only works for the punitive model of justice, one that I do not ascribe to.

If we could cut the crime rate 90%, but the people who committed crimes went free, I’d still strongly consider it.

That’s despite the fact I don’t agree that big crimes wouldn’t get solved. Of over 650,000 police officers, only 10,000 are detectives, who are trained and tasked with solving crimes. That’s a LOT of cops that solve crimes for a living at all. They “keep peace”. Sometimes you DO need a cop to keep peace, when the most important thing is the presence of mitigating force. The rest of the time, a social worker is more effective.

Watch some Police Audit videos. About one out of 10, a cop does something spectacularly good (or at least not horrible). Once, they even arrested another cop on the scene because the other cop crossed from “merely bullying” to outright criminal behavior.

The other 9 out of 10 are disgusting and disappointing. So your view of them sure isn’t far off reality.

Considering studies show dollar-for-dollar we can effectively do what good police do by putting their budget money in other services (mental health, welfare, etc), I’m ok with having a LOT fewer cops with a lot more limited mandate.

I’ll throw my support behind cops who are standing up to the bullshit.

But they are usually fired (or worse), which means the people I’m supporting… aren’t cops anymore

The problem with Nuclear’s “good enough” is that Nuclear is currently worse than other technology we have in almost every way.

1. Higher total lifetime cost per kwh than solar or land-based wind (and hydro, but that’s niche), even after factoring in capacitors for weather and time of day/year
2. Awkwardly front-loaded TCO. You basically pay a huge percent of that ugly TCO up front, making Nuclear more prohibitively expensive than its modest total lifetime cost would imply.
3. Long life. This is a terrible thing. TCO’s of solar and wind plants are predicated upon a 20 year obsolescence. That means, the TCO includes the cost to build, tear down, and make way for the inevitable better tech in 20 years. Nuclear plants are priced at 50+ year lifetimes. You can’t easily retrofit a nuclear plant with better technology if/when it starts to catch up.

It is absolutely true that solar and wind are better because more money has gone into their research. But because of that, they are better options in almost all real world power situations.

The problem with focusing on nuclear is… why waste all that political capital just to spend 100x the money or more that you could spend to be 100% renewbles in the short term? The front-loaded TCO is the real issue with that one. If you wanna hit 0 emissions tomorrow with Solar/Wind, you’re just paying the up-front costs, knowing there are per-year costs (still cheaper than fossil fuels) to keep it going. If you want to do the same with nuclear, you’re paying for almost all of it out of the gate for 50 years worth. Suffice to say, that’s a budgeting nightmare.

And what’s left is space. Nuclear creates a lot of power in a small area. But wind and solar are both far more easily/efficiently integrated into the space we are already using.

Not just us not understanding Celcius. Where I come from, we wear shorts down to 0°C or lower.

Their Schtick is that people start Herbalife “franchises” under another name, but then serve Herbalife. I believe they are generally not supposed to use the word “Herbalife” anywhere on their merchandising.

Except, isn’t Herbalife something that’s never branded? My cup had some smallbiz-seeming name on it. Definitely not Herbalife.

I subbed to an anti-MLM subreddit in the past, and that’s the exact shifty behavior they removeded about Herbalife having. I just hadn’t seen it.

The irony is, I think I agree with more points on the Communist Manifesto (not all, mind you) than I actually agree with Marxists. I feel like Communism has devolved from Marx the same way Capitalism devolved from Adam Smith.

I am actually not fond of the free market. I think regulated markets and private property with some leniency works, but is inorganic and that society is responsible to support people harmed by it. ALL forms of resource allocation are non-ideal, but a government that owns redirection (you can’t steal my food because police protect it for me, but we are all responsible for you to be able to eat whether you are a “deadbeat” or not. Ditto with all necessities and some luxuries).

So basically, I’m somewhat socialist without the goal of nationalizing small business. But if you ask many folks, I’m automatically a liberal.

I think it’s not that they have a leftist bias here, but that they have a Marxist bias. I find I get drowned, or just mass-accused of being a liberal, for simply not being a Marxist.

The false claim that Marxism is the endpoint of “left” (and that anyone who isn’t Marxist is to the right of them) is silly and makes it hard to have useful conversation even if you don’t care about downvotes.

Herbalife, fucking herbalife.

This weekend, I went into what looked like an indie smoothie shop and dropped an ungodly amount of money on a delicious sounding shake… only to watch the lady drop a scoops of powder and ONE freeze-dried strawberry into a cup with ice. Tasted like ass.

Yet they do have regulars to that shit, and nobody is taking them out of business. I want my fucking $11 back. So anyone reading this doing a class action against Herbalife, I want in…

But I doubt it, since it’s a scam that’s so normalized we don’t realize it’s a scam anymore.

That’s what the campaign to quash the bill did. That, and tried to convince people that they might have a single multi-million-dollar transaction in their life (like selling a large successful business) and have to pay an extra 4% on it.

Always a push to get the “temporarily embarassed millionaire” to support the reach. “Yeah, yanno. My little lawmowing operation that makes me $20,000 coild sell for over a million and then I’m fucked”

And caffeine.

junk science and fabricated propaganda… how?

Different discussion, and feel free to read my MANY other comments on this thread if you’re interested in my take on that. I said that’s how we see the vegan side. If you want to cover whether that opinion is accurate, my answer here is going to be RTFM in the other comments, sorry.

Besides the scientific consensus on the benefits of plant based diets on the environment, veganism is an ethical stance to stop unnecessary harm towards sentient beings

That “scientific consensus” has tons of asterisks. The consensus is that reducing global meat intake would have an environmental impact in a vacuum. And I agree with that. And as long as it’s not too many people “doing their part” by going vegan, go ahead. And as long as you don’t think that’s the ONLY thing you should be doing.

And no, veganism is not “an ethical stance to stop unnecessary harm towards sentient beings”, it’s just not eating animal products. And here’s how I can show that. If someone handed you a shotgun and said “this deer has to die; feel free to eat it. If you don’t kill it, 5 more animals will starve to death” what would you do? Trolley problem. If your stance is actually stopping unnecessary harm, you kill the deer and you feast. You kill the deer because it saves lives, and you feast because at least the death served a purpose directly.

If you don’t do those things, you’re not doing what you can to “stop unnecessary harm towards sentient beings”. But if you DO do those things, you’re not a vegan. Words have meanings, and vegan doesn’t mean “stop unnecessary harm”, it means “won’t eat animal products at all costs”.

The only science we need is to prove that plant based diets do that, and they do

I disagree. I think too much veganism, especially preachy veganism, costs more lives and causes more suffering. I see what overpopulation does every day, and I’ve seen many times how many animals die on a farm.

Also I’m definitely not pushing people away from veganism, I’ve been at this for a long time and the truth is you weren’t going to change your mind

No, I wasn’t going to change my mind because I’m educated on this matter and have been dealing with smug vegans for a decade now. Unlike a lot of dupes you might talk to, I have a background in philosophy and ethics, as well as at least some knowledge about agriculture and how farming actually works. But my wife toyed with veganism until she got annoyed by someone not very much unlike you. It led her to stop. She un-quit red meat, which was a huge win to me.

But think about this. Anyone on the fence who reads this comment chain is going to see the preachy vegans overreaching with what arguments they have and come to the not-quite-true conclusion that NONE of what you’re saying is accurate. Which is funny because we SHOULD still be trying to improve our overall relationship with food.

I’m just providing opposition to your points for everyone who reads this thread

Actually, quite the opposite. This all started because you insisted vegans aren’t smug. Readers can come to their own conclusions. At this point, I’m convinced any non-vegan reader will agree that you came across similar to a JW.

JW’s would say the exact same thing to vegans. YOU think the issue is real, but all the rest of us see is you throwing around junk science and fabricated propaganda. Ultimately, you think you can force your morals on us because you think you’re better than us… and think we have no right to do the same to you. That’s where the “smug” part comes in. You know we’ve thought about the ethics. You know we might even be more educated in right-and-wrong than you are. But you don’t care what our conclusions were as long as they differ from yours. You’re infallible on that topic, are you?

Religion is a personal choice, but actions that harm others are not

You don’t think what you’re doing is harming people? Or is it that you don’t care because your ethics are more valuable than others are? Proslytization hurts people. Which means preachy vegans hurt people.

You can call it preachy but that’s how things get better.

You’re pushing people AWAY from veganism. I’ve been on a constant mission to improve my footprint, but every time I end up in an argument with a vegan I end up so exhausted by their zealous crap that I start questioning whether it’s worth all the effort I put into MY part of the environment. It literally just makes me want to go out of my way and eat a steak, but that’s not much better (but it is a little better) than what preachy vegans do.