• 8 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • I have friends who were abandoned by their parents and subsequently adopted. I lost a half-sibling with mental illness after their religious paternal family subjected them to actual exorcisms and other emotional trauma which eventually led to their suicide. My wife has a new 60-year old biological sister that she discovered 2 years ago via DNA. I have friends who cut ties with physically and sexually abusive parents. Family is quite mutable, we are under no obligation to hold fast to toxic blood relatives, and in many cases what we consider “reprehensible” depends entirely on how “reprehensible” the blood relative’s committed offenses are.

    I’m going to assume you’re just arguing from extremely limited personal experience and save the long list of expletives I want to hurl at you on behalf of my friends and family because I’d prefer not to be banned from this community. Good day to you.














  • I’m not sure you’ll get that from any instance that allows politics, to be perfectly honest, as politics will tend to swamp all other discussion because it generates more traffic and discussion. I’ve spent time on microskiff.com (a boating forum), which is intensely right-wing, and it got so toxic they had to ban political discussion altogether. They have an open feud with The Hull Truth (another boating forum) which leans more left and attracts more voices who challenge conservatives. /r/Hunting was kinda conservative and generally policed itself, but that’s because the mod team nuked anything that went off the rails.

    Conservative-friendly spaces usually stay functional one of two ways: either they create a conservatives-only safe space or they refuse to let conservatives be overtly conservative. As someone who was a Reddit moderator for over a decade, you’re kinda driving at the major gripe conservatives have with the open internet. They tend not to get a warm welcome not because they’re conservative, but because when they flock together they tend to get disruptive and toxic very quickly. So then the warnings, removals, and bans come out, and the toxic crowd crows about being “censored”, and the toxicity/pushback ramps up in an endless loop. It’s the same song and dance everywhere they go, unfortunately. The conservative-sphere is just too infested with toxic conservatives for non-toxic conservatives find breathing room.

    Additionally, Lemmy the platform has a steep learning curve which limits it to a more tech-savvy audience, and these kinds of forums naturally attract more left-leaning users, so I don’t think Lemmy is the place you’re going to find much conservative traffic in the first place.



  • Yes, but the lede is why. They don’t really get to anything resembling a resolution until something like 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through the article. Even now I’m still unsure whether the 500k excess deaths were rabies infections or due to tainted water. They never got around to providing much clarity on that front. The paper only goes so far as to say a) more rabies vaccines were sold, b) people saw more dogs, c) fecal counts in water went up, and d) DO in water went down. But that comes with two huge caveats:

    1. Feral dog data were collected after the ban and “do not allow us to reject that feral dog populations were already higher in the high-vulture suitability districts even before the collapse of vulture populations.”

    2. Fecal coliform also has human origins. And the uptick in fecal counts (along with the decline in DO) was in areas where more people live.

    Correlation between excess human deaths and vulture decline wasn’t actually teased out into any kind of causation, and the best they could do was link death upticks with spatially isolated poisoning nodes. Urban areas had a more pronounced effect, but urban areas have a lot of other factors that can cause death, and none of those factors were controlled for, or really even mentioned in section 6.2 or the conclusion. Overall the paper is crappy because the study is quite poor, so I guess the author did the best they could with a study that tried to do far too much with far too little data.