Monkeys and apes can actually be pretty shitty creatures. So that's not all that surprising. A pack of monkeys killed the deputy mayor of Delhi a while ago:

I explained this to some friends at university when they asked me if I wanted to go to the cinema to see his latest one. The man might be a damn fine director but I refuse to give any money to someone who fled a country after being convicted of raping a child.

Obviously that means he doesn't have any feelings.

...High five for Samantha*.

If they're not doing anything wrong, then presumably their lives aren't being ruined if people find out they do it.

The proliferation of online pornography has increased the access and regularity of use. Is that a real response?

Distance on cosmological scales isn't the same as how we generally think of it in everyday life.

This is the UK. She doesn't have any medical expenses.

The odds of any one fertilised egg implanting during IVF is pretty low, so they tend to take a shotgun approach and throw a whole lot up there*. People who think life begins at fertilisation think this is tantamount to murder. The Catholic Church has maintained an objection to IVF for years. They bitched about the…

Communism isn't really a modern political ideology, and Darwin had his ideas before Marx.

I can't even begin to care if someone's "defaced a Rothko". The concept barely even makes sense.

Before segueing into a not-really-related criticism of Gillard. "I don't agree with this bad thing done to this person, but this person also does bad things" looks like (and is often code for) "they kind of deserve it".

Yeah, I may have glossed over the truth a little (a few were killed during the Kosovo conflict in the '90s, many of them by Owen Wilson). I realised afterwards but I decided the mistruth was worth it for the friendly fire joke.

If you're doing it right, I don't think there's really much difference health-wise. I think it's easier to eat a healthy diet with meat than without though. And easier again to be a healthy veggie than a healthy vegan.

I knew I'd forgotten something. Cheers.

I know there are some health advantages to both vegan and vegetarian diets, and that people generally eat far too much meat but I don't think the claim can be made that vegan diets > omnivorous diets as a rule. Some vegan diets may be better than the "average" diet but not all are.

Yeah, I did remember the whole Kosovo thing but I liked the "(intentionally)" joke so I didn't want to bring it up.

Does a wilful disregard for scientific literature fall under the benefits or costs of a vegan diet?

Making abortion unnecessary? Sounds like a plan. I'm thinking radical shifts in wealth distribution, much increased parental leave, freely available contraception and related information, better sex education, removal of financial barriers to higher education, universal healthcare and and easily available, cheap,…

You think that every war the US has fought since WWII has been a defensive one? The USA has fought wars in or invaded Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (twice), Afghanistan, the Dominican Republic, Grenada and Panama. Not to mention the various countries that have been bombed from a distance.