Paulo Seabra

To be perfectly fair, this did happen during a discussion about abortion, so I guess I can't really hold it against the guy... I was just perusing various YouTube videos, as I perhaps regrettably so often do, and about a multitude of subjects as well, not just veganism, when I came across a decidedly vegan video about something or other and I decided to pull my usual argument, namely that it makes no sense for vegans to speak of expanding the moral circle when their own moral circle doesn't include unborn people to begin with. I thought I was making some good points, avoiding ad hominem stuff though perhaps I was being a tad sarcastic here and there, and I was having a good time when all of the sudden, bang! I get hit in the face with this absolute gem. His second sentence is the crux of this here article of mine. Imagine being so kind and so loving and so compassionate that you tell a random stranger online that his mother should have aborted him, or merely exercise her righ...

I solemnly believe that every farmer, as well as every slaughterhouse worker, and even every consumer out there, they all have the right to self-determination, which means getting to choose what they do with their own bodies. No one has the right to tell a farmer he's not allowed to hold a cattle prod in a certain way, and subsequently wave his arm around in various different ways in order to achieve various different results. It's his arm, his choice, gosh darn it! End of subject! As far as the business side of things goes, no one has the right to tell a CEO that he's not allowed to live his best life, making whatever socioeconomic decisions most benefit him and his family and his second family. And as far as the individual consumer goes, no one has the right to tell anyone else that they're not allowed to buy whatever they want at the supermarket. So if you're not prepared to financially provide for that that farmer, or that CEO, or that random consumer for that m...

Okay, fine, it's not a religion per se but you can't argue it's not sorta like one. I'll be the first one to admit that comparing any ideology or philosophical system to a religion is something of a cheap shot, or it's otherwise a bit of a boring cliché. But then again, I think some clichés are clichés for a good reason... In its most immediate sense a religion would be a set of beliefs we hold as more important than any other, and for that reason those beliefs ultimately permeate all aspects of our lives, both individually and collectively. This means that, loosely speaking, whatever you value most, whatever it is that you place as number one in that system is, for lack of a better word, your god. So because vegans defend veganism as an all-encompassing moral philosophy it then permeates all aspects of their lives, and thus they act accordingly with it, in all ways. And they can do all things through beans, which strengthen them... This is not to say that veganism ...

I don't watch many movies nowadays. Long gone are those lazy college days when I'd watch five or six movies in a row, and would easily reach a hundred or more over a summer. Now I'll just watch whatever comes up and catches my eye. A fairly recent example of that was Speak No Evil, a movie so gripping and methodical that it gradually changed me from a decided skeptic watching it just because it looked alright, all the way to an instant fan, apologist and preacher. It starts slow and it moves slow, which is something quite daring for a modern horror movie to do, but even more so when it spans a relatively brief ninety-seven minutes. I for one am always impressed by movies like that, movies that know what they want to accomplish and do so comfortably in a short runtime, and still manage to find plenty of time to breathe in between. In some sense it could alienate viewers, and I believe it has, at least judging by some of the ha...

There's this awesome 1995 sci-fi film called Ghost in the Shell. It is set in a nowadays not so distant future where the vast majority of people, even the not so affluent ones, can afford all manner of cybernetic implants. This means that people are mostly normal, at least outwardly, but they are also living computers of sorts. This has a lot of advantages but also leaves them vulnerable in other ways... Of note there's a reallttty striking scene in which a garbage collector is manipulated by a powerful hacker into performing a series of tasks along his work route, all in a ploy to gain some leverage in the divorce and child custody proceedings he's currently undergoing with his now ex-wife. Long story short, the police are onto this in a sting operation, in a stellar scene that is much more complicated than what I'm now describing, and at the end of it the garbage collector is caught and found to have his brain hacked. There is no ex-wife, ther...