Yeah, in my personal experience vegan food only really started taking off once Impossible Burgers became a thing. Veganism as an activist tool against climate change and animal abuse flies right over most peoples heads. Veganism as a meat/dairy alternative that lets you eat healthier without sacrificing in flavor? Much better success rate.
I suppose both issues deal with the question at which one point one should grant something moral consideration, but there are some substantial differences. For one, you're not weighing a potential (currently non-sentient) life vs. the bodily autonomy of a woman but the life of a sentient living being vs. your craving for meat which is entirely optional.
I've long suspected the percentage of noteworthy vegan/vegetarian social media influencers who have irreversibly fatal cases of complete fucking brain rot is absurdly fucking high, and I say this as a vegetarian.
For what it's worth an overwhelming, vast majority of vego/vegans I've encountered in my life, friends and otherwise, are nothing like this, and I'm certain it's the same for most if not everyone here. You won't know most people's dietary choices unless it's relevant to conversation, and most people don't care. It is, as is always cases like this, attention grabbing horseshit from intellectually deficient morons who've little to do in their life other than suckle on the slow drip serotonin teat of social media positive feedback loops.
You don't refute someone's argument to reduce suffering by pointing out he doesn't reduce other forms of suffering.
That's whataboutism.
You think almost all vegans who are vocal about it are morons?I've long suspected the percentage of noteworthy vegan/vegetarian social media influencers who have irreversibly fatal cases of complete fucking brain rot is absurdly fucking high, and I say this as a vegetarian.
For what it's worth an overwhelming, vast majority of vego/vegans I've encountered in my life, friends and otherwise, are nothing like this, and I'm certain it's the same for most if not everyone here. You won't know most people's dietary choices unless it's relevant to conversation, and most people don't care. It is, as is always cases like this, attention grabbing horseshit from intellectually deficient morons who've little to do in their life other than suckle on the slow drip serotonin teat of social media positive feedback loops.
As a definite meat eater, I'm going to call out that this is a whataboutism
You think almost all vegans who are vocal about it are morons?
I've cut my meat consumption because vegans shared information on social media about a lot of stuff, from the treatment of animals in certain places, to the effects of the meat industry on climate change.
Many are attention grabbing assholes, yeah, but you're making big generalizations here, don't you think?
Aspey said Jewish people, feminists, and other marginalized groups should feel compelled to join the vegan movement because they understand what animals are going through. "Accurately describing the animals plight as a Holocaust should get Jewish people (and all people!) to realize how serious this matter is," he said.
Fuck these people? I understand your disagreement with it, but the comparison to the Holocaust didn't originate with food influencers, but instead with prominent Jewish animal rights activists, some who survived the Holocaust. Have all the disdain you want for online pseudo-celebrities but the actual position is a pretty nuanced one that people should seriously engage with instead of outright dismissing it as Holocaust denial or antisemitism.Respectfully it's a whole lot more than "unnecessary". It's vulgar, profane, and marginalizes one of the greatest tragedies in human history and does so at a time when anti-Semitism and Holocaust Denial/marginalization is growing.
I respect what you are trying to say here but seriously, fuck these people.
Fuck these people? I understand your disagreement with it, but the comparison to the Holocaust didn't originate with food influencers, but instead with prominent Jewish animal rights activists, some who survived the Holocaust. Have all the disdain you want for online pseudo-celebrities but the actual position is a pretty nuanced one that people should seriously engage with instead of outright dismissing it as Holocaust denial or antisemitism.
You can always cherrypick bad insta posts to make a movement look bad. 🤷‍♂️ Dropping hardly controversial takes like "Please don't kill animals needlessly" won't exactly get you an article on Vice or a thread on Era, will it? Inflammatory takes are inherently more interesting.No, I don't think most vegans and vegetarians who are vocal about their dietary choices are morons. I've been vocal about it, here and elsewhere, and if someone presses me for why I decided to be a vegetarian I have no shame in telling the choice to eat meat in a developed country is, by and large, precisely that; a choice. It is a luxury no longer necessary for health and survival, a luxury that is directly tied to (by virtue of choice) immense suffering and pain inflicted upon animals on an industrial scale. Behavioural science has long since clarified that farmed animals absolutely do feel fear and pain and frequently to great extent during their final moments during industrial scale farming, and by virtue of choosing to eat industrialised meat produce you are consciously contributing to this process. There is no escaping the rational and it's why I made choices of my own (hypocritically mind you, as I continue to eat dairy despite many of its own issues). Nevertheless, I don't need meat to live and be healthy and happy, and thus I choose not to contribute to another animal's suffering and death unless absolutely necessary. I've had this argument here a couple of times.
I was being mostly hyperbolic and facetious in my extremes, and I'm sorry if it came off as too blunt. My primary frustration is from successful influencer-types who, from my experience, are often vastly out of touch with the world and especially how to communicate their ethical choices and reasoning, opting for guilt and hysteria and weak comparisons to guilt an audience into lifestyle choices. They often have a weirdly fragmented understanding of their own nutrition, and especially when using guilt have an ignorance towards the inherent relationship between capitalist industrialised meat farming, availability of alternative produce, affordability for lower poverty classes. Especially on a global scale where the luxury of vegetarian/vegan diets is simply not realistic, due to time, resources, and economy.
But yeah, sorry if I was an ass about it. I implore vegans and vegetarians to share their ethics and choices and open up difficult discussions. It's the influencer-types I have grievances with, in addition to the overwhelming misinformation and nastiness from some people within these communities. One of my closest friends has been vegan for two decades and had to leave a bunch of vegan Facebook groups due to the bizarre influx of alternate therapy crystal healing idiots hijacking conversations and turning basic recipes for vegan biscuits into their own soapboxes.
This is the dissonance that I'm not a fan of. Moral panic when monkeys are tortured in Indonesia, whales are slaughtered in Japan, or dogs are cooked alive in China....but silence for the millions of pigs that are tortured and slaughtered inhumanely right in the USA every year and sold in the supermarket like nothing is wrong. Even though pigs are smarter than dogs and many people have them as pets.
You can't arbitrarily declare one animal "food" and another animal "man's best friend." That's just being hypocritical. Either society works towards animal rights, or they collectively don't give a shit. You can't have it both ways.
Does that make it THE HOLOCAUST and LITERAL SLAVERY? That's where PETA damages legitimate logical inconsistencies in modern-day society with extreme hyperbole.
I do implore people in general to at least reduce their meat intake. And society seems to be trending in that direction. Nearly 1/4 in the USA have cut back on eating meat, with women twice as likely as men.
Pretty funny that everybody thinks vegetarians and vegans need to be some paragon of social activism strategy and communication. Some people are so latched onto the tone of the arguments that they are too stubborn to critically review the substance. There is substance here. There are facts, much like there are in issues like climate change, feminism, etc. Concentrate on the facts, the data, and the ethical standpoint you feel is right.
This sort of reminds me when Anita Sarkeesian was really getting full attention on Feminist Frequency. So many people were fixated on her tone and some were saying "I hate how snarky she sounds". Honestly? Who gives a flying fuck about the tone. It's ok to be upset about some of these issues. Do you think Greta Thunberg is polite and nice all the time? No. She's fucking pissed, as she should be. They are injustices right on the face of it. If you're too busy to be distracted by how the facts are packaged and think you need to have some kind of silver bullet deprogramming session, you're deliberately focusing too much on the "strategy" and less on the content.
This is the dissonance that I'm not a fan of. Moral panic when monkeys are tortured in Indonesia, whales are slaughtered in Japan, or dogs are cooked alive in China....but silence for the millions of pigs that are tortured and slaughtered inhumanely right in the USA every year and sold in the supermarket like nothing is wrong. Even though pigs are smarter than dogs and many people have them as pets.
You can't arbitrarily declare one animal "food" and another animal "man's best friend." That's just being hypocritical. Either society works towards animal rights, or they collectively don't give a shit. You can't have it both ways.
Does that make it THE HOLOCAUST and LITERAL SLAVERY? That's where PETA damages legitimate logical inconsistencies in modern-day society with extreme hyperbole.
I do implore people in general to at least reduce their meat intake. And society seems to be trending in that direction. Nearly 1/4 people in the USA have cut back on eating meat, with women twice as likely as men.
You can always cherrypick bad insta posts to make a movement look bad. 🤷‍♂️ Dropping hardly controversial takes like "Please don't kill animals needlessly" won't exactly get you an article on Vice or a thread on Era, will it? Inflammatory takes are inherently more interesting.
From a PR POV I think spreading documentaries like Dominion is the most effective way to "convert" people if that's what one wants to do. Dunking on people with facts and logic (defending veganism is among the easiest debates to be had on the internet. Left and right communities argue against it with the same exact arguments which was a little eye-opening to me actually) is probably a double-edged sword, inflammatory comparisons are probably just repulsive. Show people what they are actually paying for. There's little as horrific as finding out how the sausage is made.
This is not new. Ethical vegans have made this comparison for decades. I mean The Smiths did a song "Meat is Murder" in the 1980s.
Those of us who are ethical vegans but don't yell at others tend not to express these kinds of viewpoints, but industrial-scale factory farming is desensitized mass murder. While I would not make that comparison directly, the factory slaughterhouses and "farms" practice a huge scale, efficient kind of mass killing and misery that genocidal dictatorships would be envious of.
We don't eat dogs because dogs are carnivores and you can get parasites and other issues from eating carnivores.If chickens and cows want me to stop eating them, they need to be more cute like dogs. Or dogs should be more delicious if they want me to eat them.
Pigs are raised as food with replenishable and controlled numbers. Whales are not, and almost went extinct due to Japanese whaling.
I'm not saying eating pigs doesn't do other harm, but comparing eating pigs to slaughtering whales is clear dissonance
Sure, on the other hand, trying to improve the the world and treatment of one animal group is a step. Living in a capitalist society means constantly compromising. Just because someone didn't do ALL the right things, doesn't mean they don't care. No one person can lift up and live with ZERO conflicts of interest or even have all the right information to make these decisions. Applaud the attempt and encourage more, don't mock people for not running a marathon the first time they try to exercise.
Or, you know, reminding people that eating large quantities of meat is a relatively recent phenomenon, and most Europeans and Americans up til the 20th century subsided mostly on grains, vegetables, fruits, etc. with meat being a special occasion sort of thing.I firmly believe PETA's decision to run multi-million dollar ad campaigns framing meat as a moral failing did massive, long-term harm towards the world. When you position veganism as a choice to be made for personal health reasons, or as vegetarianism as something that can be done occasionally to help the fight against global warming - it is so much easier to convince people to take part.
Furthermore, it's those campaigns that created this current generation of vegan influencers who use it as a tool in their holier-than-thou brand identity.
It's not the degree of suffering that matters, it's the dissonance between the two reactions that's so jarring. MORAL PANIC vs. silence. If you care about the welfare of one intelligent animal group (like dogs), that courtesy should logically extend to other intelligent animal groups as well (like pigs). Don't just limit your compassion to what's convenient in Western society.