A Republican politician, Senator Tuberville, was consequently interviewed where he said he supported the ruling because we need more children, which of course makes no sense. Trump and other leading Republicans then said they support IVF.

So which is it?

Conservatives have got themselves in a pickle because they are trying to find a binary answer to a complicated question. They have tried saying that life begins at conception, but now that does or doesn’t apply to frozen embryos, like a Schrödinger’s Cat policy. In different states, and according to different politicians, abortion is okay as long as it is early enough – yet that number of weeks varies greatly, meanwhile life begins at conception.

Tuberville actually got it right, if he only he (and other such politicians) had the decency to tell us that this was all about religion, and they want their followers to have as many children as possible, and so the binary solution is to never kill an embryo. Which would be admitting that, just like the Catholic Church forbidding abortion (and contraception), this is just a numbers game and not about the souls of unborn children at all.

Choices in fertility and pregnancy are too complicated for binary laws. The only fair and decent solution is individual choice, not enforcing a religious numbers game onto non-believers and non-adherents.

The post Embryos and Abortions in the US appeared first on Fuck Binary.

• Health – preventative
• Health – in response to ill health
• Taste – don’t like the taste or texture of meat – especially after shunning it for a long time
• Morals – eating animals is wrong
• Ethics – an animal suffering because of you is wrong
• Fashion – yes, absolutely, people do it to be cool
• Religion – for example Jains
• Climate change – less meat could save us all

In each of the above, being in the direction of veganism is better than not. Eating 10% less beef than before is a win. So is 50%.

Few people will cite more than one reason.

Also, according to studies, few people are actually 100% vegan, no matter how much they want to be. Late-night drunken lapses are one of the common reasons.

Also, despite high vigilance, you probably accidentally use or consume something animal-sourced sometimes.

So, it definitely is not a binary choice, and everyone has their own story and levels of compliance. Militant vegans have little understanding or respect for that, and their hardline attitudes do more harm than good.

Most of those reasons have no scientific or logical basis. You are not more likely to get into heaven or be reincarnated. There is little proof that vegetarian diets are better than simply healthy omnivore diets.

Animals suffering is also debatable. Yes, at the time of death, in some contexts, there might be suffering. But how do you measure that? Is 1 second 10x worse than 0.1 of a second? Is all suffering, no matter how minuscule, unacceptable? Doesn’t life itself involve suffering?

Plants, we hear, can feel pain and communicate it. But a vegan can’t dare go there, or else they will starve.

Rarely mentioned is what happens to cows and sheep and goats and chickens if all of humanity goes vegan? There are a hundred kept in some special farm to save them from extinction? That brings up one final angle – is the life of a sheep, who is ultimately killed for food – better than never existing at all? Who decides?

My thought – there is no absolute answer. A good person is someone who considers all the angles and makes a considered decision. A vegan, if they arrived there by choice, is more likely to be a good person, because many meat-eaters simply don’t even question that choice.

Me personally, I am trending towards veganism. I eat less meat than ever before, and substantially less beef and lamb. I’m enjoying roast cauliflower! I buy organic and sow-stall free and cage-free whenever possible. I wear vegan shoes by Cariuma, but I won’t throw out a perfectly good leather belt.

The post Veganism appeared first on Fuck Binary.

Let’s start with gender, seeing as it has taken the word binary hostage. Let’s start with transgenderism.

For most of the educated western world, most worldly and intelligent people don’t give it much thought. If someone needs to transition, good on them. How they look can be a bit out of the ordinary, but we will cope and adapt. Next topic.

In the US, opinions have been split left and right, with both taking extreme views. I am generalizing here, of course, for that makes this easier, in short form.

The right consider transgenderism an abomination, because it is new and different and scary and confusing. And because the Bible probably forbids it.

The left think it is wonderful, the more woke types are happy for it to be discussed and for transformations to even begin at young ages.

Yet transgenderism is a very individual, nuanced, complicated, emotional and weighty topic, and neither the left or right treat it with the respect and concern it deserves.

Here are some points worth considering:

• Teens are highly impressionable and latch onto fads. Some children will transition because it is cool.
• Parents opinions do matter, as with the rest of parenting. Not letting a child have candy even if they identify as immune to sugar, is good parenting
• Knowing at a younger age about transgenderism, that it exists and is an option, could be a life saver for some kids.
• Some children are arbitrarily assigned gender at birth. This is rarely discussed
• In a for-profit health system, advice could be biased.
• In religious communities, advice could be biased.
• It is not a switch. It is years of drugs and surgery and therapy and battling for acceptance and ridicule and discrimination and all the rest.
• It can both save/improve lives and end/destroy them.

It is very much not black and white and how dare anyone, especially those who chose filtered sources of information, how dare they reduce it to binary, single sentence, frigid opinions. 

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