If you have convinced people to change their minds by dint of your ideas, how is that a dictatorship? No one's sending people with guns into lobster boil festivals or grocery stores.

>> For during the Hellenistic era, Greek replaced Aramaic as the lingua franca in the Levant, and the scribes of Damascus maintained their records in Greek. But it was not the Greeks who spread Greek around the Mediterranean –Alexander (himself not Greek but Macedonian and spoke a different dialect of Greek) did not lead to an immediate deep cultural Hellenization.

Right. And the Spartans weren't Greek but Spartan and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Laconic dialect. And the Athenians weren't Greek but Athenian and spoke a different dialect of Greek, the Attic dialect. And so on.

But I wonder, which is the one true Greek language that all those dialects were dialects of? And who were the true Greeks who spoke it?

Or should I ask, is every bit of information in the article just as dodgy as the bit I quote above?

I have stepped on a dogs foot. It made a “Yipe!” noise and leapt back. Then it approached me “submissively”, with it’s head held low and tail down. It seems rather “obvious” to me that the animal felt pain, reacted suddenly to the sensation, and then completely changed it’s demeanour towards me.

I don’t think that pain requires consciousness, but not in a way you probably think I am right now. I think that we don’t feel pain either. It’s a combination of a prediction and a sensation that assembles to pain. And when you split pain into parts, interesting things happen.

First, it is a unconditional limb/muscle reaction that is hard-coded. It’s uncomfortable but doesn’t constitute “suffering”. Then there is a sensation: burning, broken, cold, etc that makes you do something in the range of acting to reduce the damage to screaming (message danger to others and maybe get help) and kicking erratically (to counteract a predator). It’s more close to “suffer”, but short episodes don’t really add up to long-term or intensive “anguish”. Some people have high pain tolerance, but it doesn’t mean they don’t feel it, they simply don’t change their state of minds so much. And then may come the understanding that you’re going to unfair die or become disabled for life, and these feelings and thoughts may be comparable to a situation of no physical pain at all, e.g. if you end up with an unfair life sentence. So basically my idea is that dying in pain is just a very negative sum of these negative components, but consciousness is not the key. It only helps to see your fate, whatever it is.

Which parts of “pain” we are trying to reduce by these laws is unclear.

This is why I'm making a distinction between pain and suffering. Pain is physiological, insects have the neurological capacity for it. Whether that translates to "anguish" in a conscious sense, that is unclear. So too would it be for lobster and crab. The problem is it's not possible to have an accurate gauge of consciousness, capacity for which. We ballpark either a lot or a little, you can't really say there's "nil". So how much does it take before it matters? Really we just intuitively approach insects differently.

I don't know if using exports is anywhere near the industry totals.

According to NOAA, in regards to US totals[1]:

"Overall, the highest value U.S. commercial species were salmon ($688 million), crabs ($610 million), lobsters ($594 million), shrimp ($531 million), scallops ($512 million), and Alaska pollock ($413 million)."

[1]https://www.noaa.gov/media-release/american-seafood-industry...