Extinction does not drive evolution, reproduction does, and if a species' food goes extinct, they reproduce less, not more.
Secondly, these animals aren't abandoning their niches, they're losing them due to human activities. There is no room for another species to adapt to it, because there is nothing there to adapt to anymore.
The problem with urban insurgencies is the people who don't carry firearms, not the ones that do. If you can identify the combatants, it is much easier to kill them.
That's a self-defeating argument. Your objection to the concept of ownership would apply to just about every concept, including your own morality, which leaves your thoughts about what _should_ be a little out of place. That is, unless you think there's something very special about ownership in the grand scheme that is not true of other abstractions...
I have the opposite problem: I don't know what anxiety is. Supposedly it's an emotion people have (and it's certainly possible I feel it too,) but I have no way to identify my feelings as anxiety because nobody has ever expressed the meaning of that term in a way the conforms to any feeling I have ever had.
The fact that I like cake is not a conscious decision. My decision is whether I will eat it or not. You don't actually have to be with the people you're attracted to. (We all get old and ugly eventually anyway.)
So you're fine with a key that doesn't open anything? How will you know it is a key at all then?
>We try to understand countless things without have a use case in mind at the time of study.
You're making a pretty clear reference to mathematics & science here, but in those disciplines we study things with well-defined structures. We don't study flighty nonsense because it's not ever going to be useful. You shouldn't invoke this phrase to excuse a lack of precision and clarity.
Under any practical consideration, free will is nothing more than an emotion; it offers you no capabilities, only a propensity to respond to things in a certain way. Without a useful definition of free will that offers something different to this, you won't have a key to anything.
Lots of people will question this stuff, but they definitely won't bring up their objections. People are incentivized to collect their paychecks and do what they're told, not to point out the absurd thinking of the managers and executives above them. Nobody is thinking they'll save their company those millions and get an recognition/reward for it. Even the professional risk assessors got ignored.
So you're not really protesting unless you light yourself on fire? You understand that if everybody who protested the "big stuff" did so by doing extremely risky things, you're going to end up with nobody left with the will to protest?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I at least explained what the problem was with the argument. "I don't think so" is not any kind of improvement there.