I advocate for humanity to live in harmony and balance with our environment, that is why I am anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist as well as vegan. Our history is plagued with exploitation, that can't be denied, but I am trying to change it and you are arguing that it cannot be changed and that we shouldn't even try.
Humanity's relationship with animals and nature has historically been exploitative but it doesn't need to be that way.
We have vastly increased our ability to produce food. There are ample resources available on the planet for all of us to share and live in abundance. Human greed and selfishness is rewarded by our society. That means our society needs to change.
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game. My happiness does not need to come at the expense of another's unhappiness. We can all work together to create a better future for all living things on our planet.
That's exactly how people justified slavery in the past, and it is how the person I replied to justified their argument. That's my entire point. It's the same argument.
Oh yeah, I'm sure the entire meat industry would continue to produce meat that nobody paid for just so they could let it all rot. If you want to eat meat, go ahead, but stop fucking lying to yourself about what you are responsible for. Every time you eat meat, a living creature suffered and died for it, and you gave someone money to facilitate that. That is the reality and you should accept it. Take responsibility for your choices instead of fleeing responsibility like a coward.
Most people agree that raping dogs is bad. Maybe they genuinely believe that raping dogs is okay, or maybe they're just saying that to deal with their cognitive dissonance. I would prefer that it's cognitive dissonance, but if they're a dog rape apologist, then they're a piece of shit anyways.
I hope it's cognitive dissonance and not authentic approval of dog rape.
You do it literally every time you purchase a meat product. Meat is made from the dead body of animals. When you buy it, you are retroactively paying for the slaughter of that animal.
Sure, and that's totally valid, nobody is saying you need to become an animal rights activist. I think everyone should try their best to live their values, and that's what I do. It's not about a quest for perfectionism or anything like that, just trying our best as little humans with limited power to make the world a better place.
Slaves can have rights and be protected from unnecessary cruelty without anthropomophizing them and granting full human rights. You’re equating full, sapient humans with a species specifically bred for a base purpose without higher levels of thought and expression.
Honestly, if someone is truly aware of the horrors of the animal agriculture industry and is totally fine with it, I would be very, very surprised. I have never experienced anyone who genuinely thinks it's okay. Most people take the position of, "yeah, it's really terrible and I don't like it, but..." which I have to live with because that's most people, but even most of the people who agree it is terrible don't really know the full truth and often they don't want to let themselves find out, because they know in their heart if they truly understood how horrific the industry is, they would feel terrible every time they ate.
If someone genuinely thought it was OK, I would assume that they're a sociopath. Not even in a bad way, necessarily, I have friends who are sociopaths, but I think that's basically the only way you can lack the empathy.
For the follow-up question, there are a few reasons, I'll outline a few of them, happy to discuss further, if you have questions then let me know.
An ethical electronics industry is possible, whereas an ethical animal agriculture industry is impossible.
It's easy to live a full modern life avoiding animal products. It is impossible to live a full modern life avoiding electronics.
The horrors of the electronics industry take place in third-world nations where we have very little influence over their laws. The horrors of the animal agriculture industry take place in our back yards where we can influence the law.
I'm not saying that vegans shouldn't advocate for ethical manufacture and disposal of electronics, I believe wholeheartedly that we should. But it's impossible to have an entire industry for making baby animals, fattening them up, and slaughtering them so that we can make money from people who wish to consume their corpses. It is fucked up on the face of it. Melting metal, pouring it into moulds to make circuitry, etc. doesn't hurt anyone directly, it's capitalism and the drive for maximal profits which cause issues in electronics. I'm a huge proponent for the abolition of capitalism for this reason too.
I think leftists can sometimes get a bit tied in knots over this stuff, because we need to defend anti-imperialist action and there are a shitload of bad faith arguments about Hamas. Most of it is pretty typical whataboutism. A state is perpetrating a genocide against Palestine and has been doing so for decades at this point. The resistance against it could commit a hundred Oct. 7s and not come close to the level of violence committed against the Palestinian people. It's very understandable to handwave it away and dismiss it, but yeah, we should just briefly accept that violence against innocent people is wrong and immediately turn it back to Israel, who, by far, hurt and kill way more innocent people than Hamas ever could.
They kinda always have been. Did everyone just forget about the Ku Klux Klan? What about the 1920s Eugenics movement? Operation Paperclip? First NATO Secretary was an ex-Nazi.
Western society is fucking teeming with fascists and nazis pretending to be polite waiting for their chance. Leftists have been talking about this for decades and just got told "not everyone you disagree with is a fascist"...
Holy shit, the Atlantic are finally acknowledging there's a problem, rather than just sanity-washing fascists and claiming that nazis have no traction.
It became a problem partially because of the media being controlled by fascists. The atlantic is one of the worst.
You left out the rest, where the calf is seperated from its mother, tortured and killed for veal, while the mother mourns the loss of her child that the milk she produces is actually for, so the milk can be stolen from her for profit.
Anti-vegans will go to any depths of depravity in order to deal with their cognitive dissonance. Once, on Reddit, I got a commenter to agree that he would be fine if someone had a dog in a cage they tortured for entertainment, rather than agree that it's kinda fucked up that we slaughter animals because their flesh tastes nice.
If you believe that animals should have rights like humans do, then animals can be raped. If slavery was still legal, would you write "it's pretty fucked up to equate slave husbandry with rape"? Just because we have historically done something, that doesn't mean that what we're doing is in any way moral.
Fun fact, we evolved to eat raw meat, that's why we have an appendix. Then, when we stopped eating raw meat, we started to evolve away from the appendix.
Evolutionary arguments don't support the naturalist fallacy, because evolution doesn't work like that. It responds to environmental pressures. It's not some guiding light for what we're "meant" to be doing, it's the tools we've got to support what we already did.
Don't worry about it, even going back over ten years when I was active on Reddit I'd get downvoted to oblivion for my position on many things which everyone now agrees with. Mainstream society usually needs a bit of time to catch up to me. A year or two from now, everyone will have been against this. I can almost guarantee it.
It's amazing what people will refuse to comprehend when their salary depends on them not understanding it, isn't it?