Paulo Seabra

I was watching the third Guardians of the Galaxy movie the other day. A bit late to the party to be sure, as I always am when it comes to movies, and I guess maybe I was in a certain mood or state of mind or what have you, because the animal abuse scenes in it made me think about a lot of things. And while there are quite a few of those scenes, the main one for me is, as it is also often the case when it comes to movies, a small one, it is a small detail, a specific and very singular moment. Then again it might not be as insignificant as all that, in great movies the details never are. A lot of thought and work is placed behind all things, and maybe a lot of meaning too, and so now I'm left wondering if I'm on to something or if I'm overthinking everything, or if maybe in a few words time I'll reconsider, and then rewrite, and then delete, this entire page. And the thing in question would be Rocket's very first word, a short and simple word that doesn't even ma...

I like to look into a bunch of things that are best avoided when talking to colleagues and whatnot. One of those things is abortion, which is obviously a controversial and delicate topic that everyone, and especially every HR department, would rather avoid. Another one of those things I like to look into, one that is maybe a bit more accessible but still controversial, would be veganism. For me these two things sorta coincided over time, with my thoughts about abortion forming into a pro-life position even while, or maybe especially while, I was looking into veganism, agreeing with it in some ways, disagreeing with it in other ways, and even having spats with vegans here and there... Whatever it may be, I just kept finding lots of echoes of the two ideas as listening to vegan activists in video essays or podcasts makes me very often come across thoughts that I could very easily plagiarize into a pro-life statement. In fact, a quick exchange that I once “won” against a vegan was when ...

I've written about this topic at least once before, when I was more or less at stage two of my opinion on it. The first time I was confronted by this idea, when I was more or less as a teenager going into my early twenties, I immediately leaned towards the pro-choice side. I did so due to a combination of not seeing the embryo as a morally valuable thing in and of itself, and of believing that it would be kafkaesque to force a woman to carry something in her body against her will for nine months, and to then be forced to undertake the birth itself as well as the subsequent recovery with all its potential long-lasting side effects. In many ways those instances aren't washed away clean, they still make the entire matter of abortion a delicate one. Still, I've now come to see even the pro-choice name as a euphemism, and furthermore, like all things, and especially like all things nowadays, to win or to lose a debate about this topic is often contingent on optics, it's more...