I hear you. Didn't mean for that to come across as an attack on you.
Lemmy is such a fickle place. Just a few days ago people were clamoring for Democrats to make a purely performative abortion vote that would be doomed to fail, merely because it would send an important signal to voters. Now people are skeptical that performative signal votes are sincere because they won't go anywhere. Not saying you, specifically, but the whiplash is really frustrating.
Second, sure, it's a low risk bill because they know it won't go anywhere, but damn isn't it good news that somebody is putting their money where their mouth is? Maybe we just need to primary in more Dems who will sign on and help push it through?
The recent NCAA conference kerfuffle proves money was only part of the problem, though. While there certainly have been declines in state support and endowment revenue, they've also spent decades prioritizing things like sports, facilities, and coaches over research and academic programs. And we can't even justify it by claiming that Universities need to prioritize revenue-generating entities to support non-revenue generating entities, because sports lose a stupid amount of money each year. They've lost track of what Universities are supposed to be doing, which is education, and they're doing it in a way that keeps them trapped in a financial doom loop.
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:
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."
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.
Blech. The opening to the article isn't any better, and they clearly buried the lede to keep you scrolling. Here's the gist:
Vultures eat cattle carcasses.
Anti-inflammatory cattle medicine Diclofenac is toxic to birds.
Price of Diclofenac falls in 1994, becomes widely used.
95% of vultures in India die over 1990s and 2000s.
Diclofenac banned in 2006.
Rotting livestock carcasses, no longer picked to the bones by vultures, polluted waterways and fed an increase in feral dogs and rabies.
Districts with no vultures saw uptick in human deaths. Districts with vultures saw no uptick. About 500,000 excess deaths across India.
What a fucking terrible article.
cAnCeL CuLtUrE11!!!! fReEzE pEaCh!!!!!!@
Lol, yep. Oh you spray lots of stuff that's designed to kill bugs? I think it might be killing lots of bugs!
Part of your anger seems to stem from me saying that this whole thing isn’t moving forward fast enough and somehow you think that’s a critique of your personal work. I assure you that wasn’t my goal. But you have to admit that we are, globally, not moving fast enough.
No, the part that bothers me is you're completely ignoring the point I've made multiple times, namely that this protest is counterproductive and doesn't actually do anything to change the situation. It just pisses people off. It doesn't promote climate action or change the amount that people care about it or want to do something about it.
The connection to the fight for racial equality is interesting but I’m not sure how well this applies. How do you suppose you can do anything equivalently “not accepting the rules we want to protest” in the context of climate change? Because before there was a big movement there were just a few people breaking the unfair rules. Which where likely talked similarly about as you are talking about these activists right now.
With the exception of the first, none of those sentences form a complete thought, and I honestly have no idea what you're trying to say or if there's a question buried in there somewhere.
some forms of activism that I deem valuable would have detrimental effects on the other form of activism if done under the same name.
WHY?
This is so far beyond the point of the article I'm just not sure why you keep falling back on this singular argument. Why is that relevant? This thread started because I said the people currently sitting in prison are being lazy because they painted a rock rather than doing something productive. You've now latched onto some weird scenario where they can do multiple kinds of protesting but can't do it in one organization and have to form or join splinter groups to do multiple kinds of organizing? It like you've convinced yourself that what JSO is doing is fine because its members are doing something else less disruptive in another group, which is so disconnected and irrelevant as to be utterly meaningless. Not to mention it's a thing which (as far as I can tell) is entirely made up on the spot!
So again, why is one detrimental to the other? So far you've only said it's confusing, but you haven't said why it's confusing, and you also skipped over the part where painting a rock to protest oil is also confusing.
And I'm saying one does and one does not. You've yet to actually demonstrate that these protests have any value or have ever moved the needle in the right direction.