Of course I don't, although in my case it is. The deeper point is that if people were to reflect more closely on the origin of their food, this would certainly be a win for veganism. After all, plants are seen as many things but "gross" is not usually one of them.
Disappointed you had to jump straight into censorious mode and tell others literally to shut up.
This is unintentionally revealing of the West's changing linguistic taboos.
As I understand it, a thousand years ago the worst linguistic transgressions were religious, involving words like "God", "Jesus" and "devil". Then, in the premodern period, that became pretty innocuous and the taboo shifted to words concerning disgusting bodily functions, "shit", "piss" and so on. And then in Victorian era it was sex, female virtue, prostitution, all of which remains at the heart of the slang action in the Romance languages. To protect sensitive souls, I will not spell them out.
And in today's post-modern Anglosphere, all of that stuff is now utterly anodyne. The most terrifying words are now all about group identity. And of course here the taboo is now so absolute that the context doesn't even matter, I would be banned for even typing the letters.
Interesting.
Very easy to answer that: no. This falls under the "No original research" rule. The information must be publicly available from a reputable source. If you had insider info about Elvis's peanut butter you would need to write it up and get your article accepted by a recognized publication, basically.
It's an encyclopedia. That makes it a tertiary source. Just as a secondary source (book, journalism, and so on) should cite its primary sources, a tertiary source should cite its secondary sources. Yes, you should be able to source the origin of every assertion of fact.
The point still stands that no one outside of the US cares about their constitution or political system, and to say it does shows an incredible level of ignorance of world politics outside of US borders.
I'm not sure these sweeping statements are really helping your argument. Despite my "incredible level of ignorance" I am in fact not American myself, I have no particular reason to defend the USA for the sake of it, and I stick to my assertion that the stability of the US Constitution and the American social contract is unusual in world affairs - and even that this is not particularly controversial among historians and pol-sci specialists, notwithstanding your dismissiveness. Don't agree? That's fine, but maybe consider letting up on the contemptuous tone, it doesn't really elevate the debate.
Very few countries in the world have had a political history as stable as the USA's over the last couple of centuries. Take France, which since 1788 has had: an absolute monarchy, three revolutionary regimes, a constitutional monarchy, two imperial regimes, a bout of full-on fascism, and five separate republican constitutions. At most of the junctures between those things, there was suffering and bloodshed. Maybe people "don't give a fuck about the US constitution" - it certainly looks like Americans don't, these days - but the stability of American democratic politics is genuinely very unusual and the constitution obviously has something to do with that.
As for your take on populism in the world, I am not as nonchalant as you. Yes, the rot has been stopped in some places, for now (Brazil, Poland, partly India) but in general it is still very much on the march. India, Turkey, Philippines, Hungary (which is right inside the EU - and now Slovakia too), El Salvador, Mexico, Tunisia, etc. The Arab world is less democratic than ever. And of course China is once again going full dictatorship only a few decades after discovering what a bad idea that is with Mao. Personally I doubt that China is much influenced by US politics, but pretty much everyone else in the world is. And most of this happened quite neatly during the period following Trump's first election. Whether it is mostly cause or correlation, the link is there.
Yes and that's the sad paradox. America's interest is now (at least temporarily) at odds with the interests of freedom and democracy. Trump's abuses cannot be seen to pay.
Inexplicably unpopular opinion: the priority for Wikipedia is not to delete whole articles, it's to delete unsubstantiated content within articles.
Personally I would be in favor of a bot that, after expiry of a time limit, deletes everything in an article - everything - where no citation has been provided. The resulting encyclopedia would be smaller but more accurate by definition, and almost certainly more useful.
I just cannot understand why it's so widely considered acceptable that articles contain unsourced factoids for years, even decades, on end.
The worst impact of this debacle will be outside the USA. This will be taken as a green light for strongman politics everywhere. Including here in Europe where that sort of thing has ended very badly in the past.
You Americans really have behaved like spoiled children. Whatever the leftist fringe here thinks, the American constitution is the envy of the world. You're on the same electoral calendar since the 1780s, without a single interruption. For literally centuries your leaders would follow the rules, shake hands and leave office when their time was up. Over and over again. It's an incredible achievement, it was the template for a successful democracy.
And then this ogre came along and broke it all, and you decadently voted him back in.
IMO America's institutions will contain the damage, probably. But other countries will inevitably now follow the example of America's voters. And for some of them that's going to turn out less well.
Enlightening if unsurprising. I have certainly found that eliminating meat from my diet has been an order of magnitude easier than eliminating dairy. Very frustrating.
Dairy really is the triple whammy of harms: terrible for the environment and animal welfare, and probably unhealthy too. This last claim is controversial but it shouldn't be: humans do not have much evolutionary preparation for imbibing milk as adults, let alone the milk of another species. This is a weird modern habit unique to humans.
Hard to deny that in most cases. But not all, because people's minds work differently. Personally I rind risible the idea that somebody is attacking my "culture and way of life" when they question my diet. Am I really so rare in my individualism and openness to new ideas?
Because here's the thing: I personally have stopped eating certain foods simply after thinking about what they are. Cheese is literally the congealed secretions of the mammalian reproductive apparatus. Pretty yucky when you think about it like that, right? No rational arguments or statistics required. That's a pretty cheap conversion to veganism. Yes, I know that most people will not be open to this kind of novelty thinking. But presumably some will, especially if it can be done with humor.
True. I've always found mushrooms a bit icky too, but I soldier on and eat them anyway because they're so healthy.