The reason cats can’t be vegan is that they cannot produce an amino acid called taurine, which is something dogs and humans can produce (but which we also get sometimes from dietary sources).

Most dietary sources of taurine are meat. This is why dogs and humans “can be vegan” but cats “can’t”. However, vegan taurine is made and can be bought as a supplement, both for humans (if you want to ensure you get some taurine in your diet), but also in properly made vegan cat food.

It seems to me then that cats can be vegan, just not without intentional effort to ensure proper supplementation of taurine. That is, they couldn’t be vegan in the wild (where the only source of taurine is meat) and you can’t just start to feed them a vegan diet without taurine and expect the cat to be healthy and survive.

In fact, cats fed a proper vegan diet tend to have better health:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499249/

I think the question is really what you are feeding your “vegan” cat: if you have managed to find (or make) a properly fortified vegan cat food it is theoretically possible to feed your cat a vegan diet.

This all feels a bit like the “controversy” around feeding young children and babies a vegan diet: done poorly it can be catastrophic (pun not intended), but it’s entirely possible to have a healthy vegan diet when enough effort is put into ensuring nutritional needs are actually satisfied.

That said, I also know of two other vegan responses:

1. for some vegans, having pets is not vegan to begin with, so a “vegan cat” is a contradiction in terms even if you fed them a vegan diet, you still wouldn’t be an ethical vegan by owning a cat. This is admittedly a less commonly held view which centers ethical veganism on the rights of animals to have autonomy, which if plausible in some ways seems at least impractical in the case of domesticated animals. There are questions of the harm that might be caused by choosing to treat cats not as pets but as autonomy-rights-bearing “wild” animals, but those ethical vegans might rightly point out this doesn’t undo the cat’s rights and the practical questions should be handled separately.
2. most vegans I know IRL just feed cats a non-vegan diet, acknowledging it is safer and more reasonable for their cat than trying to figure out a way to feed them a vegan diet. Good vegan cat food isn’t that common or easy to find as far as I know, and I assume it would be outrageously expensive.

There are more carbs than represented in that radar chart.

Oh, I love that - greyscale as a warning.

For a while I had my whole phone on greyscale, but I don’t have trouble with spending time on my phone - it’s really the laptop that I have an issue with.

Maybe I should write software to conditionally greyscale my desktop/laptop screen!

Thanks for the link and details, so helpful!

Yeah, I like to get distracted and sucked into things, esp. on the computer. When I get that way I don’t get hungry or thirsty, I don’t realize I need to use the restroom, etc. - just completely ignoring the body (which is nice for me). I’m pretty sure it ruins my posture and creates muscular-skeletal problems, too.

Either way, interesting idea about listening to sounds or music - maybe that would increase enjoyment, but I worry it would reduce the usefulness of the resting (part of what I think helps is that I seclude my senses and I usually lie down in a quiet and dark place). Still, something to explore and see if it wouldn’t make it easier to motivate me to do it instead of rotting on the screen.

hey thanks!

One thing I have noticed is that I sometimes turn to this impulsive behavior when I feel really tired and I just need to rest, and I think of scrolling social media as an enjoyable kind of mental and physical break. So I’ve tried a few times to just set a timer on my phone and lay down and close my eyes for a bit instead, which makes me feel much more rested and works better as a break for my mind and body than scrolling social media.

However, this requires the awareness in the moment that the motivation for the social media impulsivity is that I’m tired and that I need a break, and I need the additional will-power to choose the better and admittedly less fun sounding alternative of actually resting - so as you can imagine establishing that new behavior has been a losing battle.

Anyway - I appreciate your positivity, thanks for your question and comments!!

What timer do you use, and does it lock access after a set time or does it just notify you when the alarm goes off?

EDIT: I found this app: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/mind-the-time/

It keeps track of how much time you spend on different websites (so not so much an intervention / reminder as a time tracker).

That is good advice, but I don’t have any apps and I don’t tend to spend much time on my phone. I find the mobile UI annoying, so it’s really desperation when I turn to a phone to browse a place like Reddit. Usually I do it when I have a burning question that I want to explore and I’m not otherwise able to use my desktop or laptop.

I’m trying to find a way to nudge myself away from this impulsivity on desktop, which the redirecting helped do. I keep thinking maybe I could write some javascript and use greasemonkey to load it and do what I need.

1. I prefer to feel in control, and when I notice impulsivity and difficulty stopping or changing the behavior, it’s a red flag for me
2. the amount of time spent is too much and I find it wasteful, the time could be better utilized, even if on a different down-time or recreational activity which leaves me feeling better or is more enriching
3. Lemmy / Reddit / whatever social media usually has some content that is useful or good in some way, but I would say most of the content I consume when engaging impulsively ends up not supporting my mental health (e.g. doomscrolling is a more common outcome from this impulsive behavior than, for example, engaging with community or other reasons that I seek these places in the first place).

Other addicts are exactly the people to ask.

Sleep paralysis may include hallucinations, such as an intruding presence or dark figure in the room.

Had this happen when I was a teenager, and it was terrifying. I started to scream and woke everyone in the house up. Of course my parents decided it was caused by what I liked to read and banned my pleasure reading.

34°

OK, but really - what was the last book that made you cry?

Have to sign in to listen on Youtube as “age verification”.

Have to sign in to listen on Piped.video to prove I’m not a bot.

Guess I won’t listen to it. :-(

I don’t think its too spicy, I just think it isn’t very smart or strategic.

The ACAB crowd obviously doesn’t love Harris precisely because she’s a cop, but as Transient Punk pointed out, the ACAB crowd didn’t choose Harris and don’t represent most of the Democratic party, who skew right-wing. (Whereas the back-the-blue types overlap much more with uncritical enthusiasm for Trump, who they see as an innocent man who has been wrongfully convicted by a corrupt and politically motivated justice system.)

The Democratic coalition made up of progressive, leftists, and more right-wing liberals holds together by pragmatically overlooking these divisions and cooperating against the even-further-right, and this meme sows division right before a major election where Democrats are divided (e.g. over Israel) and having a hard time unifying.

In that sense this meme will get a reaction, but again not because it is spicy but because it is divisive.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacinda_Ardern

Labour prime minister of New Zealand. She was great, I was sad when she stepped down.

Pandering to the right, yes - but this is just how coalitions work. Obama’s ability to appeal to rank and file white workers in places like Michigan is part of how he won. A lot of Obama voters in those states voted for Trump.

Not everyone on the right is an ideological zealot (even if those are the most visible and make up the base). Being able to pick up some votes among “center-right” voters is a long-standing electoral strategy for the Democrats.

Yeah, though supposedly SEO could actually penalize articles for something like this, the SEO requirements keep changing but I bet there is a balancing act between keeping SEO happy and keeping up your ad impressions.

Articles are often made intentionally too long (ever notice recipes that force you to scroll through loads of irrelevant copy about the ingredients before you can get to the ingredients list and directions at the bottom?), this probably has to do with advertisements which will fire off when you scroll far enough down the page, it counts like an additional page view and the site makes more money.

It’s from Ted Danson’s podcast, this part starts around 1:18: https://youtu.be/VRWvN7jDYC8?si=ODThZBvRKqHzQMAp&t=78

There has been plenty of research into the etiology of gender dysphoria, but the current science considers gender identity as fixed and biological, which makes sense of why conversion therapies have been so unsuccessful (otherwise the conservative medical establishment would be more likely to recommend conversion therapy to solve the “problem” of trans people, as talk therapy is much less intervention, much cheaper, and much more socially acceptable than medical transition).

Here is a relatively accessible paper on the topic by esteemed endocrinologist Joshua Safer: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31027542/

It’s behind a paywall, but that can be circumvented if you know how.

More interesting than whether mental illness is more common in trans people because of how they are treated by society (which seems almost obvious, though worth confirming empirically) is whether mental illness might be more common for trans people because of the biology, such as from having the “wrong” sex hormones in their body.

Gay men who were forced to take estrogen in the UK experienced symptoms like depression and suicidal ideation, and lots of the same things trans people report (there is speculation whether Alan Turing being forced to take estrogen may have contributed to his suicide).

There is also the famous case of David Reimer whose penis was accidentally amputated during circumcision as a baby. Under the direction of the psychologist John Money, who believed gender was entirely determined by environment / social programming, was raised as a girl. Reimer consistently struggled being raised as a girl, eventually decided he was a man, and struggled immensely with mental health struggles before his suicide.

Suicide seems to be a common thread among those suffering from gender dysphoria, with over 40% of trans people reporting having previously attempted suicide and over 80% having considered attempting suicide (source), and it’s not surprising cis people when forced to take cross-sex hormones also seem more likely to commit suicide (though we don’t have as much evidence about this in particular, so take that as speculation on my part).

All this to say, religious trauma and sexual abuse certainly can and do complicate someone trying to figure out whether they are suffering symptoms of gender dysphoria or not, but the current evidence points to gender dysphoria not being caused by environmental factors (like sexual abuse) and likewise not being reversible with any kind of known treatment other than transitioning.

Furthermore, there have been autopsies of trans and cis brains that have found parts of the hypothalamus in trans women match cis women’s, even if not taking hormones. Here is a relatively accessible overview by neuro-endocrinologist Robert Sapolsky about those autopsy studies which were high quality and confirmed with follow up studies several times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QScpDGqwsQ

Being trans cannot be adequately theorized in merely biological terms, so please don’t mistake me for implying there are no social aspects to being trans, but I do think there is sufficient evidence that gender identity and dysphoria have biological components that aren’t influenced by environment.

Regarding trans women and plastic surgery: many trans women transition before puberty and thus look and sound pretty much like cis women, i.e. they develop as cis women would. Obviously even in those cases some trans women opt for surgeries, and while neo-vaginas have some differences, they are more like natal vaginas than most people realize (both in look and function).

In that sense, it doesn’t sound like being trans is what you don’t like in a woman, but rather certain body features that might be more common in trans women who have transitioned as adults (breast augmentation, facial feminization surgeries, narrow hips, etc. are more common in trans women who went through male puberty). But there is a huge variety of trans women, even those who transition as adults don’t necessarily get breast augmentation or facial feminization surgery, though narrow hips are obviously more common still.

Perhaps this seems like nitpicking or like I am making an irrelevant or theoretical distinction, after all if most trans women you know look a certain way, is it that wrong to generalize this way. The problems of stereotyping aside, part of the problem is that trans people in general are under a lot of pressure to conform to cis-sexual norms, and those who can go “stealth” typically do. That means, a bit like sexual minorities, it can be an invisible identity, but where a subset of adult trans folks especially early transition are more likely to stand out as trans. What we think of as a paradigmatic “trans woman” is someone who doesn’t conform that much to our cis-normative notions of a “woman”, and that is because of that unintentional sampling bias.

I acknowledge this is a lot, so let me stop here and see what you think so far.