Read the second paragraph again. I explicitly said that I’m not happy about their suffering, regardless of their political opinions.
It’s just disingenuous to claim that people merely take issue with their opinions when it’s the actions that are the real problem, although that still doesn’t justify schadenfreude.
This is “people with a different political opinion are suffering, yaaaaaay!”
To be fair, the issue isn’t that they have “a different political opinion”, the issue is that they will cause insane amounts of suffering and deaths down the line if they get their way. Climate change will kill millions of people, and trump and his supporters seek to make it even worse for short term political gain (aside from the attempts to install an authoritarian dictatorship and all that stuff).
That being said, I’m also not happy when indoctrinated people suffer, regardless of their murderous ideologies. Imo it’s more of a cultural issue, and nobody has any direct control over the culture/social environment that they grow up in.
But the majority of us loves our animals
And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.
I guess we should start barbequing pet dogs then. At least that’s less cruel than factory farms, fwiw.
This is partially why most veganism arguments that try and say that we shouldn’t kill and eat animals and instead we should kill and eat plants usually fall on deaf ears for me just because it makes an implicit assumption that plant life is worth less than animal life
Animals don’t create biomass from thin air though. They have to eat a lot of plants to grow.
the production of 1 kg of beef requires 8 kg of feed and 14.5 thousand liters of water. For 1 kg of pork, 3 kg of feed is needed and nearly 6 thousand liters of water
Eating plants directly instead of feeding them to animals is clearly much more efficient, requiring much fewer animal deaths as well as plant deaths to sustain a human.
If plants are sentient, the moral argument for veganism is even stronger.
You’ve already made strides to avoid eating anything that may be processed in the same facility as animal products.
But why? This would just make it much harder for (smaller) companies to bring vegan products to market.
You largely eat whole ingredients that you buy and prepare personally. And you would probably never touch a pre-made meat substitute.
Most vegans I know eat meat substitutes rather regularly. Eating a whole food diet is primarily motivated by health. Some vegans also try to be as healthy as possible, sure, but many don’t really care about that.
Ethical veganism is about not financially supporting the commodification of animals, especially on factory farms, nothing more.
BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.
It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.
Much worse for who?
My point is: if police were completely abolished, conservatives and the far right would feel very unsafe and immediately form militias that enforce their values. That would be much worse for everyone who doesn’t share their values, of course.
I get that in many countries, police is badly regulated and you might say that this wouldn’t actually change much, but I’d rather seek more accountability for police, compared to a complete abolishion, leaving a power vaccum that’ll be filled by right wing militias with zero accountability.
Divesting seems good to me though, much of the police is certainly overfunded (due to law and order populism) and does useless shit (like the war on drugs), while education, social workers and programs against poverty are severely underfunded. Changing this would surely help a lot with crime reduction and other issues.
Thanks for the links by the way, I will look more into them when I have more time to see if my concerns regarding abolishion are addressed.
So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.
We could tax greenhouse gas emissions to internalize the environmental cost.
If the beef burger would cost 2x more than the plant-based burger (which basically tastes the same but has 90% fewer emissions), most people would choose the plant-based one. That would massively reduce food related ghg emissions, and also create a huge incentive to develop better alternatives/lab meat.
There’s no way they would do that since climate change is a “tradegy of the commons” problem.
The tragedy of the commons is a metaphoric label for a concept that is widely discussed in economics, ecology and other sciences. According to the concept, should a number of people enjoy unfettered access to a finite, valuable resource such as a pasture, they will tend to over-use it, and may end up destroying its value altogether. To exercise voluntary restraint is not a rational choice for individuals – if they did, the other users would merely supplant them – yet the predictable result is a tragedy for all.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
Currently, every country seeks to maximize the emissions that they are still allowed to have without being penalized (internationally, and by their own population).
So 0°F was defined as the freezing temperature of a solution of brine made from a mixture of water, ice, and ammonium chloride (why in the world?). Originally, 90°F was set as human body temperature, which was later changed first to 96°F, and now it’s about 98.6°F.
Celsius is just: 0°C is the freezing temperature of water 100°C is the boiling temperature of water
Nobody uses a scale between -18 and 38. People in countries using Celsius just learned as a child that body temperature is 38°C, that’s all. -18°C has no special meaning to us.
At 0°C outside it’s freezing (32°F). 10°C is quite cool (50°F), you’ll need a jacket. 20°C is a comfortable temperature for me, if it’s sunny (68°F). 30°C is getting rather warm (86°F). 40°C is hell outside, or a bad fever (104°F). To boil water, heat it to 100°C (212°F).
I get that this seems confusing at first when you’re used to completely different orientation points, but for people who are used to C, it’s very intuitive.
The good ones tend to do something in-between, with a market based economy, but good regulations, solid welfare, and democracy. Scandinavian countries have the happiest populations in the world, maybe we should try to learn from them.
Unfortunately corporations get more power over time instead of less. They have an ever growing pile of money to buy media and politicians to push their interests, that’s probably the greatest challenge of democracy.
How is this anti western? Pretty much every country in the world is capitalist by now.
Do you really need to tell everybody?? They’ll never give me the ring now…
I got really fucking tired of being called fucking stupid for buying meat free alternatives.
Sorry that you met condescending assholes. Some people just have the urge to feel superior over others for absolutely silly reasons. The rise of meat alternatives is one of the few things that make me optimistic for the future, along with renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps. Factory farms are so much worse for the environment and animals, of course we should embrace alternatives to the worst option.
Prices also go down with more competition. There basically wasn’t any market for meat alternatives 10 years ago, now it’s growing quite fast. In 5 years, many of them will likely be cheaper than meat.
You wrote vegans, not peta. Most vegans have nothing to do with Peta.
Who kills a shitload of dogs? I think you replied to the wrong comment.
I don’t know, life before the industrial revolution was pretty shit for regular people too.
I’d rather not have to worry about my family (and friends) starving to death during the next famine. 40-60% of children in medival europe died before adulthood. I can’t even imagine the psychological suffering caused by this alone. Then there was frequent war and disease outbreaks, basically no healthcare, and so on…
I’m not saying that everything’s great nowadays, we urgently need to fix many issues. But many things were way, way worse before modern civilization.