You have great reaction memes, and I’m shamelessly harvesting them.

I am so here for this.

The entire joke is about people repeatedly being targeted and killed by Russia. It’s generally a dark joke.

I work at a small, premium pet food manufacturer. People already complain about our prices. While most of our ingredients are sourced domestically, specialty meats are not. Lamb, duck, venison, goose, etc. going up will dramatically raise our prices.

Many of our products are chicken, pork, or beef-based, and these ingredients are sourced domestically. The fun twist is the rise in popularity of breeds and designer mixes that are predisposed to ingredient sensitivities or allergies. Many of these breeders advise against chicken or beef in these dogs’ foods.

You’d think people spending 3-9 thousand dollars on puppies would be in a position to afford special diets, but my experience says otherwise. It’s about to get a lot worse.

We’re lucky, in that we’re one of the few brands who utilizes mostly domestically sourced ingredients. I would expect pet food to jump generally, which doesn’t bode well for the increased pressure shelters and rescues are already facing.

It was not us, baby, he was born this way.

My underlying point was the nuance of this entire situation, and you provided another obtuse black-and-white response. If you can’t radically accept the world and your life, it’s going to make it awfully hard to see it well enough to make changes.

It doesn’t take enthusiasm to make an active move toward harm reduction if and when you see the opportunity, especially when the consequences are this serious. I would love to see ranked choice voting and a diverse and motivated number of parties to challenge the dichotomy we have now, but I live in the reality of the viable options in front of me in this moment.

This isn’t about an acceptance or endorsement of the system we have now. Unfortunately for all of us, however, this is the system we currently live in. If my choices are between bad and catastrophic, I’m going with bad. Doubly so in cases like these. The choice is either the people who are suffering may or will continue to do so, versus these same people suffering even worse while making multiple new groups of people suffer, too.

If Trump wins and things get as bad, or worse, than the scenarios that have been proposed on record, more people will continue to lose their homes, autonomy, and lives in the United States. Many people who are suffering from atrocities actively going on in places other than the Middle East will likely also be worse off under these policies.

I hope those people who feel as if they own the moral high ground will remember they had an opportunity to stop it and chose to do nothing if we suddenly all find ourselves living in that world.

I sincerely feel sad for you that the concepts of a broad sense of empathy and deep connections with others who don’t share half your DNA seem like such difficult mental exercises, and that you assume those who choose not to act against their values are somehow less moral or caring about society. I don’t know who failed you, but it was certainly someone important.

I appreciate and agree with most of your post, but I disagree that we are all so disconnected from each other’s feelings. Perhaps it’s a regional thing, but many of us have relatives, if not friends, who deeply disagree with our politics. We not only get exposed to the others’ views through social interactions, but we also absorb any political media they have on in the background on holidays and other get-togethers. Some of us also want to understand what the other end of the spectrum is exposed to and seek out some content from these sources for a variety of different reasons.

I don’t understand the mindset and thinking of people in my life that are so far on the other side when it comes to these issues, but I don’t write them off or feel disgusted by them as people unless and until they start promoting hate speech in most cases.

I’m also not experiencing any delusions about inevitable outcomes on election day. I’m preparing for either reality, but I’m more actively preparing myself for the opposite outcome of what I’m hoping for. Lemmy does a great job of reminding me how possible this is in comment sections every day.

I’m doing what I can by helping and encouraging friends, coworkers, and my partner to vote. He even requested an absentee ballot after months of telling me he wasn’t going to vote. I didn’t push, and I don’t consume most news media when we’re together. He has just had a harder time ignoring the evidence of his eyes and ears lately.

Nothing is decided. If we care at all about not feeling the gut punch that was November 9th of 2016, if not worse, then we should do what we can to prevent that from happening again.

Only because of the sniffing actually

Brand new sentence, and I love it.

Only because of the sniffing actually

Brand new sentence, and I love it.

You’re accusing others of extremism in the same breath as you make one of the silliest slippery slope arguments I’ve come across. You think those who choose not to have children due to climate concerns are sitting back, over consuming resources, and thinking they’ve done enough? That’s not an extreme assumption?

Be careful, you’re treading awfully close to hypocrisy.

True, but not people they care about. I can only imagine the mental gymnastics it must take to be this apathetic about such drastic increases in maternal mortality and trauma, and yet still sincerely believe you’re a moral and decent person.

Women are dying, being jailed, and forced to carry unwanted pregnancies because this archaic soapbox is getting its long awaited crawl out of the dark ages. It costs zero dollars to mind your own fucking business, and now we’re paying in lives because some people are weirdly obsessed with controlling strangers’ lives.

I can only speak to my own experience. Most of their communities I’ve seen are not a place where nuanced views are appreciated. I saw a particularly 4Chanesque take where a guy was trashing a girl he dated for her interest in astrology. He was more than fine supporting it and humoring it while they were together. Once dumped, though, he had to use it as an example of everything he had to be tortured with in the relationship.

I had a couple of things to say about that kind of attitude, but the whole of my response centered around learning to pick partners who are aligned with our own values and goals. They banned me because of my username. I have no idea why, other than making assumptions about my views and values in a negative way. A peep into my post history should suggest otherwise, but anyway.

I don’t have a lot of respect for people with strong views that are sensitive about having them challenged. It isn’t a good faith argument.

I live in Wisconsin, and I can assure you Scott Walker is a gigantic piece of shit.

It’s a slippery slope. I heard if you listen to too many sea shanties you will start aggressively lactating.

I’m curious why you assume almost all were willing participants. I’m also concerned with the use of the word “coerced”.

The promise of good money doesn’t ensure willingness, and just because workers are “street level” doesn’t mean they aren’t being exploited.

Mental health is health, and treatment for these conditions are healthcare.

I used to work in veterinary medicine, and there are plenty of vaccine conspiracies in the pet owning community. They cause everything from seizures, to allergies, to autoimmune diseases, and more, according to some of these people. Breeders are a huge contributor to this, which leads to plenty of arguments with vets and pets running around unvaccinated.

It’s expensive to get litters of puppies vaccinated, and whackadoodle (I used “doodle” for a reason) theories are a great cover for why you are sending home a puppy with zero medical history outside of hand written worming dates. Unfortunately, it’s harder to educate people when it’s way cheaper to believe bullshit.

It’s a Gentle Leader. It doesn’t function like a muzzle, because it doesn’t inhibit a dog from biting. It’s basically a harness that attaches at the head. You can read more about them here: How to use the gentle leader