I'm not a fan of kids either. But hey...guess what? Not being willing to put on your big boy pants and suck it up for an hour is the very definition of "being a selfish asshole".
The fact that the first thing you talk about is how those kids are "going to be the focus of the occasion" (your words), shows that what you lack isn't "enthusiasm about catching up with someone". What you lack is basic human empathy.
From an artistic perspective, self-"publishing" (and I use quotations quite on purpose), changed writing as we know it and drastically dropped the average reading level of the public since now any chimp can bang their fist on a keyboard for an hour, upload it to Amazon and call themselves an "author" beside Stephen King or Umberto Eco.
It was always hailed as "the end of the so-called gatekeepers". Without stopping to realise that gatekeepers/publishers exist for a reason. So that the public zeitgeist isn't completely overrun with utter crap.
The response to having your short story or novel rejected used to be "okay...I'll learn, practice and get better for the next time." Now, it's "screw you...I'll pollute the zeitgeist with my 3rd grade level grammar nightmare with or without you and put it right up there on the shelf next to the actual writers."
Just imagine if a doctor flunked out of med-school, and instead of trying harder, just said "screw you, I'm going to open up my own surgery and put it right next door to you and there's nothing you can do to stop me...."
What a crazy stupid world we live in.
I don't drive an F-150. I drive a quarter-tonne specifically because I wanted to balance my need for a truck while lessening the impact as much as possible. That's called "working within the construct of reality" because as a homeowner, I need to make those kinds of decisions.
If we hadn’t evolved this way, we would have evolved another way
Uhhhh....no...we wouldn't have. That's the entire point.
In order for humans to develop things like speech, tool-making, complex sociological relationships, everything that literally makes us human, required a big brain. Big brains require lots of power in terms of caloric density. Which is why becoming meat-eaters was a threshold in our evolution. No meat...no homo sapiens, end of story.
Whatever we would be, (If we would evolve at all) wouldn't be considered a homo sapien. It would likely be just another branch of an early hominim species that died out shortly after moving down from the trees.
You are correct that evolution is not a "ladder". You're trying to educate someone who literally majored in archaeology with a minor in history. The past is quite literally my thing. There were many many early hominim species that began evolving. Why we're here and they aren't is because we had the brain power to figure out how to control our environment. And that brain power came from the caloric density or meat.
So no...we wouldn't have evolved "another way".
Barring any sort of major accident. Almost certainly suicide.
But not in an "I'm depressed, get me out of here by any means necessary kind of way."
More in the, if I have terminal disease, or am otherwise going to be suffering a slow painful death, or I'll be a burden to those around me because of health limitations, I'll take myself out of the equation quite logically and happily.
So in that regard, there are only two possibilities; sudden accident, or taking care of it myself when the alternative is a slow decline.
And yes, old age is just another terminal disease, just on a longer timescale.
Actually, it's been widely proven that being carnivores is precisely the reason we evolved to be where we are in the first place.
There was no other diet that had the caloric bang-for-the-buck that allowed the complex requirements of the hominid brain to actually evolve.
Due to a process of ‘encephalization’, humans have a larger brain size than would be expected for their body size. To sustain an expansively large brain, energetic compensation was required during hominin evolution. When examining individual organs, the brain mass surplus (and its energy requirement), is closely balanced by the reduction in size (and energy requirement) of the gastrointestinal tract. This is not surprising, considering the gut is the only organ that can sufficiently vary in size to offset the metabolic cost of a larger brain (Aiello and Wheeler, 1995). This process required a shift from a diet high in bulky plants of low digestibility (requiring voluminous fermentation chambers such as a rumen or cecum, or an extensive colon), to a higher-quality diet where foods are more energy dense and require less digestive processing. In temperate grass and woodland environments, this equates to an animal-derived protein-rich and fat-rich diet (Speth, 1989).
Full text here
So sure, keep making up your bullshit about whether or not we need to eat meat. But while you're doing so, remember to thank a carnivore for evolving us to the point where you have the priviledge to make such a choice.
No its not and I'm tired of trying to explain the concept of moral equivalence to idiots who think that it is.
Its the same difference as would be hunting for food versus hunting for trophy sport. I can be perfectly fine with people hunting a deer in order to make some delicious deer sausage. But be against them hunting that same animal just to cut off its head to show off in their den.
I can be perfectly morally fine with the idea that SOME forms of lower life are acceptable harvests for my own sustenance, but be morally outraged by animals being killed for needless reasons or sadism.
Despite vegans attempts to muddy the issue, context matters.
Its the same reason I would set a trap to kill a mouse that is causing trouble in my house, eating and pooping into my rice bag. But wouldn't go out of my way to plant traps in a place where those same mice aren't bothering me.
Its the same reason I'd kill a moth that is keeping me from sleeping at night, but leave it alone if its harmlessly flying around my garage.
Context matters. So quit your faux-outrage bullshit.
One million dollars per assassin until one of them eventually gets through to Trump, then Vance, than Musk, Than the Republican Supreme Court. After that, a 50,000 dollar bounty on any sitting member of Trump's Cabinet and any sitting member of the GOP.
Even if it takes every penny to finish that list and I end up right back where I started. I'll still consider it money well spent.
Anything less than a full Nuremberg level cleanse of nazi's in America is just not going to be sufficient.
Kill them all.
And I'm not being even the least bit facetious.
By "came into", I'm going to assume that you either received it for free or got it very inexpensively because of circumstances.
In which case I'd take the opportunity to make a profit by selling it for far more than it's value to some moron who see's an Apple logo and automatically creams themselves. They're not hard to find.
Then you can buy whatever you want.
Someone please put razor blades in this fuckers twelve daily bigmacs already please.