At least this is what the science suggests.

If you’re not vegan, there is a good chance that you are actually anti-vegan. You are also not likely to be aware of it until you are confronted with the movement or its adherents. What I mean is this: have you even become almost overwhelmingly agitated by what you think is just more of that “vegan propaganda”?

Do you just wish that those plant-eating hippies would just shut up about their cause? After all, they are really pushy about other peoples’ own choices. Eating meat, wearing leather, or raising animals is a personal choice. Why are the vegans so adamant?

As opposed to becoming vegan, being anti-vegan is nothing you ever chose for yourself. Anti-veganism is endemic in the culture. It is the result of animal exploitation being so woven into the very fabric of many traditional and modern societies. …

Remembering his awful assessment of “The Four Temperaments.”

Every college-educated person, especially the liberal arts kids (Hi, Wake Forest University!) will recognize the name, Immanuel Kant. He is the quintessential enlightenment thinker. Kant is a central figure in many branches of philosophy, especially ethics, where he pioneered deontological ethics — the school of thought that deals with things such as duties, obligations, or the things we ought to do.

Mr. Kant is also a pioneer, for better or worse, of the discipline of anthropology, which at the time was simply understood as the study of human nature. …

Constructing the closet in United States law

Believe it or not, there was a time in US military history when there was an actual law on the books that strictly concerned gay and bisexual members. Simply, the law — dubbed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT)— prohibited the harassment of closeted members of the military. Seems cool, right? Well, no.

The law also prohibited anyone openly gay or bisexual from even entering the military once it was passed. The law only protected — if you can even call it protection — members that were already serving as long as they made a home in the closet. …

Veganism is not defined by its complicated history, but by its future of ending exploitation.

Recently I came across an interesting article entitled, Why I Say “Plant-Based” Instead of “Vegan.”

Although I disagree with a lot of what it says, I think it does echo a lot of the misconceptions about veganism, and vegans in general. I have been vegan for a while now and the reasons for doing so have definitely ebbed and flowed. Veganism has also been a conduit for me to really open my eyes to numerous areas in my life where I might practice mindful harm reduction. Here’s what I am talking about.

Yes, Veganism is about Ethics

At its heart, veganism is about an ethical viewpoint. …

Combining thought experiments with empirical ones to grow that empathy muscle of yours.

Have you ever felt bad for someone in a precarious situation? What about felt bad with them? You see, the first is what is known as sympathy — an outside perspective of understanding another’s situation. The latter could be characterized as empathy, which is different.

There are different types of the phenomenon dubbed “empathy” but for our purposes we will require that empathy means either “…imagining what one’s own thoughts and feelings would be if one were in the situation of a person in need,” or, “imagining the thoughts and feelings of the per-
son in need.” The first is psychologist Ezra Stotland’s imagine-self perspective conception of empathy; the second is an imagine-other perspective. …

Hi, y’all! This week I am welcoming a couple of new writers to Pollen. Their work is really great and well worth a read.

Featured:

Trent Brown’s A Climate Carol — How I’m haunted by the Ghosts of Climates Past, Present, and Future is an amazing piece about a changing world. Brown brings us into his life as he is visited by the three versions of the climate crisis: the past, present, and future. It’s beautiful.

Dale Lynn’s What the Heck is Pebble Mine? is a wonderful article about the Pebble mining operation near Bristol Bay, Alaska. The operation has been underway, off and on, for a while. This piece brings the issue into the year 2020 and its status. …

These historic X-ray images did the trick!

When I was younger, I used to love looking at the X-ray photographs of my teeth. The way this technology could — within seconds — flip you inside out without ever really touching you was amazing to me. Imagine how amazing it was for Wilhelm Röentgen, who discovered the X-rays in 1895. He must have been psyched.

Röentgen’s groundbreaking paper on the topic of X-rays was published the year after his initial discovery in 1896. Entitled “On a New Kind of Rays,” the essay laid out his work on the newly discovered type of radiation. …

The waking advantages of dreaming.

Hold fast to dreams, / For if dreams die / Life is a broken-winged bird, / That cannot fly.

— Langston Hughes

It is well known that getting to sleep, and sleeping for a certain amount of time, is important for overall health. Without sleep, you just feel like crap. Hughes was onto something else though. He says “hold fast to dreams” not “hold fast to sleep.” Hughes was not psychologist or neuroscientist, but what he says turns out to be right on the mark.

Sleep occurs in 5 distinct stages; the first four can be thought of as falling deeper and deeper into sleep. The brain isn’t doing a whole lot. Then, it comes alive. Rapid Eye Movement, or REM, is the fifth stage of sleep and your brain lights up with activity. …