They're considered separate fields because they focus on different problems which are amenable to different techniques, leaving their expert practitioners with very different knowledge bases. You're right that it is a cultural distinction, but that doesn't mean it isn't an important or practical one.
There is no position from the perspective of beings that don't exist, let alone a neutral one. It's always the beings that exist that make decisions, and it's always their perspective that counts.
Really, it doesn't matter if an animal that doesn't exist would 'prefer' to exist in suffering, because that's a purely counter-factual fantasy to begin with. All that matters is whether we should prefer such an animal to exist. Anyone who prefers they wouldn't based on vague moral arguments has to reconcile that with the fact that killing those animals for food is right in line with correcting the 'error' of their birth.
A better way to make the argument is to appeal to things we do actually care about in an ethically consistent manner: how inefficient and wasteful it is to raise animals for food. If you have something that is more efficient, tastes better, and is healthier, then it becomes harder to justify that waste, regardless of anyone's moral position on suffering. Anything else is just an reasonless appeal to emotion.
> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. [0]
For example, having learned about mummia, I might incorporate it as an item or crafting ingredient in a game :) and a player might learn about this through that, which may inspire them on to something else.
Federal tyrants have access to nuclear weapons, missiles, aircraft carriers, tanks, drones, satellites, etc. How do you expect to fend off tyranny with asymmetric military capabilities? At best it would put you in a perpetual state of guerilla warfare, which isn't any less of a tyranny.
Heavy armaments are tools of obliteration, not of occupation. You can't search homes with a drone. You can't enforce curfews with a battleship. Such weapons are useful in subjugating a foreign state whose people and infrastructure you care little for; they are not practical in suppressing widespread domestic insurrection. To control a population, you need boots on the ground, armed with small arms - against which we the people are evenly matched technologically and vastly superior in number. There would be nothing perpetual about the guerrilla situation - the feds would run out of feds.
A revolution is a matter of public opinion even more than it is a matter of martial might. The day that the feds start nuking their own people is a day by which they have already lost the war.
I don't understand these distinctions. North Korea doesn't control its population with only boots on the ground, it controls it by controlling the border (with ships), the political arena (with nukes), and by controlling infrastructure like roads, food distribution, media (with tanks, artillery, and manpower.) The US government doesn't need to control every person to control the population, it just needs to control its strategic assets, and it can do that with drones, bombs, tanks, etc just fine. If you can't get food because your crops are defoliated and your roads are barricaded, you're not resisting for very long.
Anyway, the argument here is as much about the government controlling the people as it is about the people controlling the government. If the US government turned against its own people militarily, the only way you could recover is if you could regain control of the military and turn it back against the government or if you could somehow get a more powerful military to overthrow it. A revolution from within can only succeed if it controls the actual military.
I'm going to quote a previous comment of mine here, because I think your rhetoric is shallow:
>Violence is usually too far removed from the relevant abstractions. It's not difficult to see violence behind everything, because rules don't mean much if they aren't enforced, and it's all too easy to conflate violence with a threat of violence, or a threat of force with a threat of violence, etc.
> But that's not a very useful perspective; a well-functioning society filters violence so that it is only applied when things go seriously awry, and most of us should only ever threatened by minor inconveniences. To focus on violence is to be reductive; it is like trying to talk about programming in terms of electromagnetic laws -- yes, computers ultimately run on electricity, and social powers are ultimately enforced through violence, but the abstractions we've built atop those facts are actually very relevant and useful.
I am not saying that. I'm saying that considering the government to act only violently is a gross mischaracterization of reality such that even if you define things such that it is technically true, it is not a useful position to take.
My government has never forced me to do anything with a threat of violence -- I have been threatened with different manners of obvious inconvenience, but if that is no more acceptable to you than an actual threat of violence, then I'm afraid that is an unproductive, reductive, and uncompromising opinion.
>This kind of argument relies on the idea that human beings and animals are fundamentally different
The argument that humans have any sort of ethical duty at all assumes that humans and animals are fundamentally different. Animals don't have any ethical duty to prevent their food from suffering.
EDIT: Furthermore, human suffering is categorically different from animal suffering because human suffering can be inter-generational and have very long-term consequences. Animals don't transfer their suffering and their morality between generations, and that fact does make human suffering much worse than animal suffering, because human suffering can lead to arbitrarily catastrophic consequences. A tiger biting a human can lead directly to the complete extinction of the tiger. The emotional content of the suffering my be similar, but the consequences are not.
That doesn't logically follow. My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer. If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
EDIT: So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
>My argument is about this case, not about hypothetical cases in which animals cause each other to suffer.
I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
>If I were able to communicate with, say, a predator who likes torturing its live prey, I'd be happy to do my best to convince them not to do so.
If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
>So as long as we strip children from their parents (like cows) and thereby ameliorate the generational connection to the parents suffering, it doesn't matter so much that we cause suffering to both the parent and the child?
What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
> I don't know what you're talking about. You said it is wrong to assume humans are different from animals, which makes this case a case of animals (humans) causing suffering in other animals (cows).
I'm making a claim about what humans should and shouldn't do to cows, namely that we shouldn't torture them. The behavior of some kind of predator does towards its prey is not relevant.
> If I crapped gold, I would be rich. That doesn't mean you can assume I am rich. You can't make a convincing argument by basing your assumptions in fantasy.
You found a loophole in thousands of years of logical reasoning! Hypotheticals aren't real or useful in thinking and communicating, who knew!!
> What? No. This has nothing to do with parent-child relationships, it has to do with the fact that humans teach and write and communicate ideas across long periods of time. If you take away the ability of humans to communicate and teach each other, then their suffering will be comparable to animal suffering. If you teach cows to read and write, they will stop being treated like animals.
By your reasoning, then, it's actually the torture victims writing about it who are causing the reverberating suffering. If they didn't opt to communicate and teach, their suffering would be fine. Maybe after you've finished convincing everyone to torture animals you can start to shame the writing of memoirs by torture victims?
I don't think you've honestly tried to understand what I'm saying, and I don't think your attitude reflects the maturity I expect of someone seriously attempting to discuss ethics.
From an outside perspective, that waste is probably the most interesting and valuable part of the moon now. And this idea of 'purity' is rather absurd, given the size of the moon. Almost nothing in the universe is so pure that you can't find contaminants on the order of ~1 part per mole. Do you complain when someone leaves a gold atom on a sugar cube?
It's easy to give vague advice though, and the more vague it is the less actionable it tends to be. These "huge leaps" can be seen as a counterpoint to that, where people are trying to do something, and anything less extreme won't really feel like something -- it won't feel like a life-changing event.
It's not just people's heads that need protection. Roads, traffic lights, cars, power lines, windows... people can die in lots of ways other than having a drone fall directly on their head.
