I don't think you can really say it's not comparable when painting black people as more akin to livestock than like, people, was a significant part of the rhetoric on why slavery was permissible. The comparison was directly used to justify slavery, and the logic of industrial capitalist exploitation and extermination is still lurking in agriculture today.
That's not to say that slavery and industrial animal agriculture are literally the same thing, but it's still extremely concerning as we hurtle towards ecofascism.
No. Those are generally rejected in human relations. I'm talking about the relationship humans have to nature. I'm not saying humans should model their behavior off some species or another.
Yes, humans very much evolved as a predator. We have always dominated the weak among us and taken from them without remorse. The history of humanity is one of conquest and violence. There is no other way, embrace this reality.
Modern industrial farming is exactly like hunter gatherer tribes. Human society can never progress past that point and consider moral or ethical points that go beyond the level of someone bashing a rock over someone elses head to steal someone elses dead elk.
You are correct. Cultures which still hunt are just "ooga booga me smash rock." They are incapable of developing a morality or philosophy which incorporates their relationship to prey.
I said that people still hunt in a cooperative way with nature, and I was met with:
Oh, so you think you're a wolf
Human society can never progress past that point and consider moral or ethical points that go beyond the level of someone bashing a rock over someone elses head to steal someone elses dead elk.
These were both incredibly racist & chauvinistic.
an Indian vegetarian says that Americans haven’t progressed to a more enlightened position towards their food
No one said this to me, but I would agree if someone did say this.
They are incapable of developing a morality or philosophy which incorporates their relationship to prey.
And one of those might be vegetarianism or veganism, out of a respect in recognising the sentience of other animals and seeking to reduce their harm, you fucking moron.
The person who thinks veganism and vegetarianism is incapable of being adapted, understood, developed or accepted by indigenous cultures because they're all exclusively so tied up with animal consumption that it would be apparently impossible to suggest it, and that suggesting otherwise is somehow a rejection of darwinism.
So you admit you’re a dipshit invoking indigenous culture as a shitty broad shield so as to not be made to personally think about your societies relation to modern farming practices
I have literally said nothing about this. I have said that humans have relationships to animal, which include hunter/prey relations.
because you prioritise not feeling any personal guilt.
I try to avoid animal products I don't hunt or fish myself. The most I spend on animal products is eggs from my neighbor. I grow a decent portion of my own food. I'm not particularly guilty of my consumer choices. This all sounds like projection.
Hence invoking Darwinism, as if modern industrial society is comparable to some “state of nature” which you are clearly using indigenous culture as a stand-in for.
Humans are not divorced from their environment or Darwinistic relations to other animals, even in industrial societies. This is not exclusive to indigenous societies.
I have literally said nothing about this. I have said that humans have relationships to animal, which include hunter/prey relations.
Yes, you are invoking indigenous cultures as a stand-in for state of nature, to imply ethical or moral consideration of the well-being of animals is somehow de facto off the table, which is obviously absurd.
I try to avoid animal products I don’t hunt or fish myself. The most I spend on animal products is eggs from my neighbour. I grow a decent portion of my own food. I’m not particularly guilty of my consumer choices. This all sounds like projection.
Cool, so why are you so absurdly defensive that you keep insisting we can only talk about indigenous cultures when talking about vegetarianism or veganism. That's a bad faith argument that does not at all relate to what vegans or vegetarians argue, even if we were to accept that no indigenous culture has never developed a philosophy that might imply well-being of animals as a consideration, and that therefore invoking indigenous as if it were a homogenous, identical mass that is unthinkable to not have animal consumption.
Humans are not divorced from their environment or Darwinistic relations to other animals, even in industrial societies. This is not exclusive to indigenous societies.
Not addressing the point. Invoking broad generalities does not deal with the specifics, which is human society today does not broadly exist in some small scale state where it has no option but to eat meat out of sheer desperation. In continually invoking indigenous societies, you are reducing them to a single identical mass, and also avoiding the actual point of discussion of most vegans and vegetarians, which is industrial society that envelops most of the world. It is also fetishising indigenous cultures to present them as if they are beyond discussion or critique, as if we were to invoke certain historical cultures to defend e.g. human sacrifice.
You keep invoking Darwinism as if this puts moral or ethical considerations out of consideration and therefore ends the discussion. It is quite right to point out that therefore you are making an absurd, reductive argument. There are many things that happen or could happen that could be deemed necessary in a "state of nature" or a claim to desperation or a claim to some society that does not have affordance we have. That does not make a position flatly wrong, as is the case in any ethical or moral claim e.g. murder is generally wrong, even if I could be pushed into a situation where it might be deemed acceptable out of desperation, defence, etc.
Yes, you are invoking indigenous cultures as a stand-in for state of nature, to imply ethical or moral consideration of the well-being of animals is somehow de facto off the table, which is obviously absurd.
I haven't said anything about "indigenous culture."
I grew up in a rural settler society. We recognize that invasion fish, brought by international trade, are extremely detrimental to our ecosystem. We need more people fishing & consuming these fish to slow down ecological collapse.
We also recognize that human activity is causing the extinction of vulnerable species & predators, the rapid boom white-tailed deer population. We need to intervene to protect vulnerable species, which includes more hunting white-tailed deer to slow down their dominance over all natural food sources.
These are examples of humans, in industrial societies, needing to perform the role of predator in the ecosystem. And I haven't even gotten into husbandry relations.
why are you so absurdly defensive that you keep insisting we can only talk about indigenous cultures when talking about vegetarianism or veganism
I have not limited this to indigenous cultures. The problem is that veganism does not make much sense outside the context of mass industrially produced animal products. And the root of the problem there is our alienation from nature.
You don't think a pig or a cow have the concept of freedom? And the cow doesn't resist the killing?
You say whales suffer from being enclosed but maintain a cow doesn't if it is forcibly impregnated once a year, having its child taken from it days after birth, milked for ten months until dry? The strain that puts on its body, that isn't suffering? Would taking a whale's child away from it cause suffering?
If you can watch the standardized process by which these products are made, and then conclude there is no suffering, please do. Watching Dominion was a big part of convincing me of the things I believe now and didn't before.
Here's the part specific to Cows -- https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=3183
You haven't yet defined why cattle are not slaves, you said it was their inability to conceive of freedom, their inability to suffer, but you seem to now concede those.
If it's funny to you that the two might be compared, ask why. It's definitely not something traditional society discusses, so maybe that's why it's so foreign of a concept to you.
So wage slaves, who do work of their own volition, are more valid slaves than other sentient beings kept in cages and exploited for their reproductive systems and eventually, flesh? If slavery is not defined by suffering, what is it defined by, the absence of free will?
It's very easy to write ethical questions off as nonsense. That's what the right does when discussion of trans identity come up, that's what they do when discussion of black reparations come up. They're conversations that lack logic to them because they have never been made to consider them before, not in school, not by their peers.
I would challenge that the battery cages that house five chickens in a square meter for their entire lives are a bit more than loose restrictions on their freedom. I think it would be a struggle to find and manage a system that places greater restriction, since capitalism would have been incentivized to do it.
This comes back to just having the knowledge of what I'm talking about here, look at this clip of what a battery cage is: https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=1583
And then let me know if you consider this loose restriction on freedom. I think the cages are the main reason for their suffering here.
You need to ask yourself what thinking is behind the thought that humans have the inherent right to not be enslaved over an animal. It certainly wasn't always that way, and isn't in many places still. That's what we're talking about, so to reference it as a forgone conclusion without justifying it skips over the point of the discussion and the question.
Laws define ethics now? I'm certain that police brutality has a legal definition, but doesn't actually define it properly in our legal system, does it? Definitions are defined at some point by people, they are not immutable. The person who had to define it before you had to have reasoning, and that's the same reasoning you need to explain here to justify the definition.
Did you think I was arguing "putting the cheese in the mouth" was the ethical issue? You're right of course, at that point it's just cheese.
But purchasing those things creates the demand that someone somewhere has to put a living being through torture, a horrible life in a warehouse having child after child stripped away. And if you value the capacity for empathy of a whale, it's the same for a cow.
Other animals don't need to have the same concept of sexuality as people in order to be raped, I hope that's clear enough. We have animal cruelty laws against our pets for a reason. It may not be a sexual violation to them, but it is still physical harm. It is exploitation of another being that suffers.
If you did watch the standardized process of how we produce these things, which I've linked twice now, I think that more than sufficiently demonstrates harm. If the harm shocks you, maybe that says something about you, because there's no other way to present it. The machine lines of individual animals having their throats slit, dipped alive into boiling water, the cows struggling in the pens to avoid another bolt shot into their skulls.
And for what? A meat we can mimic with soy or pea protein? A cheese we can mimic with cashews? There's no rationalizing it.
I have a strong feeling you didn't watch it, and I can't make you, but it would give your arguments a lot stronger ground if you have the full knowledge of what you're talking about in the future.
cows love when people take away their children. Cows love being killed. Cows love being forcibly impregnated and milked everyday, despite common infections of the udders. Just because you don't care doesn't mean they don't
I, as a good abolitionist, always avoid using cotton products and I do my part by shaming others into not using cotton products as well. This will surely end the system of chattel slavery in the South. Consumer choice is surely how systemic change, god forbid revolutionary liberation, occurs. Yes
I, as a good abolitionist, always avoid using cotton products and I do my part by shaming others into not using cotton products as well. This will surely end the system of chattel slavery in the South. Consumer choice is surely how systemic change, god forbid revolutionary liberation, occurs. Yes
@jabrd -
That was very much an actual abolitionist policy. Source.
It cut into cotton farmers sales, which was just terrible.
It also didn't end slavery. Without grounded materialist analysis all of these discussions are just a morality circlejerk rather than a discussion of tactics/organization to pursue the political goal of animal liberation. That's why all the accusations going back and forth are about tone and privilege, there's nothing deeper there to discuss
Yes, yes, I agree. It is better to not take any steps against the machine unless it will fully solve the problem.
In the meantime, we must all accept things as they are and continue to purchase goods and services at a predictable and easily forecasted rate of profit.
Unless you're taking part in some organized political group that's actively pursuing the goal of animal liberation (and if you are, great job) you are taking no steps against the machine yourself. This lifestylism bullshit isn't saving any lives, it's just giving you a morality chub to stroke all over the internet
Animal liberation isn't the top of my political agenda. I take part in local organizations pursuing other goals. If it is your top priority then great, but I hope you're actually doing something about it other than buying the Che Guevara tee shirt equivalent of putting a "my food is grown, not raised" bumper sticker on your car
"eating meat is morally equivalent to slavery" lmao ok
oh no please don't compare slavery of sentient beings and slavery of sentient beings. You're not allowed to compare similar (but not identical) things
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the same? No. Comparable? Yes. Pigs are smarter than 5 year olds, does that make it ok to enslave 5 year olds? What about disabled people?
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Nothing is comparable as long as I can shove my index fingers down my ear hole deep enough that I don't have to hear it.
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Because enslavement of any sentient being is cruel and unnecessary. Is that something you disagree with?
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I don't think you can really say it's not comparable when painting black people as more akin to livestock than like, people, was a significant part of the rhetoric on why slavery was permissible. The comparison was directly used to justify slavery, and the logic of industrial capitalist exploitation and extermination is still lurking in agriculture today.
That's not to say that slavery and industrial animal agriculture are literally the same thing, but it's still extremely concerning as we hurtle towards ecofascism.
only if they are killed humanely
yes that's a thing
i mean, i've seen the omaha child steaks advertising, pretty sure it's humane and besides, children can't feel pain anyway
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Nature is an asshole. Huge CW:
spoiler
Do we murder, rape, eat our own children?
Appealing to nature is just lazy, humans aren't part of nature. We live in a society
No. Those are generally rejected in human relations. I'm talking about the relationship humans have to nature. I'm not saying humans should model their behavior off some species or another.
I fucking hate settlers lol
Political ecology would like a word with you
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children are my property, therefore i may dispose of them as i please because it doesn't violate NAP
Yes, humans very much evolved as a predator. We have always dominated the weak among us and taken from them without remorse. The history of humanity is one of conquest and violence. There is no other way, embrace this reality.
:capitalist:
Chapo Vegans 🤝 Nazis
Darwinism & Social Darwinism are the same thing.
TIL, thanks for clearing that one up.
"I'm basically a wolf guys."
Me, discovering the concept of "hunting" on an online Leftist forum:
"Wow, so people just LARP as wolves?"
Modern industrial farming is exactly like hunter gatherer tribes. Human society can never progress past that point and consider moral or ethical points that go beyond the level of someone bashing a rock over someone elses head to steal someone elses dead elk.
This is the racism that just keeps bringing me back to Chapo.
"It's racism to suggest moral and ethical considerations might change as human society changes and our understanding of the world changes with it"
You are correct. Cultures which still hunt are just "ooga booga me smash rock." They are incapable of developing a morality or philosophy which incorporates their relationship to prey.
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I said that people still hunt in a cooperative way with nature, and I was met with:
These were both incredibly racist & chauvinistic.
No one said this to me, but I would agree if someone did say this.
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And one of those might be vegetarianism or veganism, out of a respect in recognising the sentience of other animals and seeking to reduce their harm, you fucking moron.
What are you responding to?
The person who thinks veganism and vegetarianism is incapable of being adapted, understood, developed or accepted by indigenous cultures because they're all exclusively so tied up with animal consumption that it would be apparently impossible to suggest it, and that suggesting otherwise is somehow a rejection of darwinism.
Cool, go talk to that person.
I don't care whether your opinions on hunting or husbandry are adopted by any culture, and I have said nothing about that.
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I have literally said nothing about this. I have said that humans have relationships to animal, which include hunter/prey relations.
I try to avoid animal products I don't hunt or fish myself. The most I spend on animal products is eggs from my neighbor. I grow a decent portion of my own food. I'm not particularly guilty of my consumer choices. This all sounds like projection.
Humans are not divorced from their environment or Darwinistic relations to other animals, even in industrial societies. This is not exclusive to indigenous societies.
Yes, you are invoking indigenous cultures as a stand-in for state of nature, to imply ethical or moral consideration of the well-being of animals is somehow de facto off the table, which is obviously absurd.
Cool, so why are you so absurdly defensive that you keep insisting we can only talk about indigenous cultures when talking about vegetarianism or veganism. That's a bad faith argument that does not at all relate to what vegans or vegetarians argue, even if we were to accept that no indigenous culture has never developed a philosophy that might imply well-being of animals as a consideration, and that therefore invoking indigenous as if it were a homogenous, identical mass that is unthinkable to not have animal consumption.
Not addressing the point. Invoking broad generalities does not deal with the specifics, which is human society today does not broadly exist in some small scale state where it has no option but to eat meat out of sheer desperation. In continually invoking indigenous societies, you are reducing them to a single identical mass, and also avoiding the actual point of discussion of most vegans and vegetarians, which is industrial society that envelops most of the world. It is also fetishising indigenous cultures to present them as if they are beyond discussion or critique, as if we were to invoke certain historical cultures to defend e.g. human sacrifice.
You keep invoking Darwinism as if this puts moral or ethical considerations out of consideration and therefore ends the discussion. It is quite right to point out that therefore you are making an absurd, reductive argument. There are many things that happen or could happen that could be deemed necessary in a "state of nature" or a claim to desperation or a claim to some society that does not have affordance we have. That does not make a position flatly wrong, as is the case in any ethical or moral claim e.g. murder is generally wrong, even if I could be pushed into a situation where it might be deemed acceptable out of desperation, defence, etc.
I haven't said anything about "indigenous culture."
I grew up in a rural settler society. We recognize that invasion fish, brought by international trade, are extremely detrimental to our ecosystem. We need more people fishing & consuming these fish to slow down ecological collapse.
We also recognize that human activity is causing the extinction of vulnerable species & predators, the rapid boom white-tailed deer population. We need to intervene to protect vulnerable species, which includes more hunting white-tailed deer to slow down their dominance over all natural food sources.
These are examples of humans, in industrial societies, needing to perform the role of predator in the ecosystem. And I haven't even gotten into husbandry relations.
I have not limited this to indigenous cultures. The problem is that veganism does not make much sense outside the context of mass industrially produced animal products. And the root of the problem there is our alienation from nature.
"Trust me my high powered rifle and camouflage make me just like a natural predator when I'm hunting"
"It's just evolution"
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in what context is slavery ok? Please enlighten me
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a 5 year old's notion of freedom does not extend further than its immediate living conditions, does that make enslaving them ok?
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so you don't mind if I kill them for food?
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ok lemme sell my five year old for money if that makes you more comfortable
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What distinguishes them, in your definition?
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You don't think a pig or a cow have the concept of freedom? And the cow doesn't resist the killing?
You say whales suffer from being enclosed but maintain a cow doesn't if it is forcibly impregnated once a year, having its child taken from it days after birth, milked for ten months until dry? The strain that puts on its body, that isn't suffering? Would taking a whale's child away from it cause suffering?
If you can watch the standardized process by which these products are made, and then conclude there is no suffering, please do. Watching Dominion was a big part of convincing me of the things I believe now and didn't before.
Here's the part specific to Cows -- https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=3183
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You haven't yet defined why cattle are not slaves, you said it was their inability to conceive of freedom, their inability to suffer, but you seem to now concede those.
If it's funny to you that the two might be compared, ask why. It's definitely not something traditional society discusses, so maybe that's why it's so foreign of a concept to you.
So wage slaves, who do work of their own volition, are more valid slaves than other sentient beings kept in cages and exploited for their reproductive systems and eventually, flesh? If slavery is not defined by suffering, what is it defined by, the absence of free will?
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It's very easy to write ethical questions off as nonsense. That's what the right does when discussion of trans identity come up, that's what they do when discussion of black reparations come up. They're conversations that lack logic to them because they have never been made to consider them before, not in school, not by their peers.
I would challenge that the battery cages that house five chickens in a square meter for their entire lives are a bit more than loose restrictions on their freedom. I think it would be a struggle to find and manage a system that places greater restriction, since capitalism would have been incentivized to do it.
This comes back to just having the knowledge of what I'm talking about here, look at this clip of what a battery cage is: https://youtu.be/LQRAfJyEsko?t=1583
And then let me know if you consider this loose restriction on freedom. I think the cages are the main reason for their suffering here.
You need to ask yourself what thinking is behind the thought that humans have the inherent right to not be enslaved over an animal. It certainly wasn't always that way, and isn't in many places still. That's what we're talking about, so to reference it as a forgone conclusion without justifying it skips over the point of the discussion and the question.
Laws define ethics now? I'm certain that police brutality has a legal definition, but doesn't actually define it properly in our legal system, does it? Definitions are defined at some point by people, they are not immutable. The person who had to define it before you had to have reasoning, and that's the same reasoning you need to explain here to justify the definition.
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If you're acknowledging that eating meat and dairy is cruelty, and wrong, then what argument is there left to have? We agree.
Everyone, including the two of us, should stop creating the demand for those products.
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Did you think I was arguing "putting the cheese in the mouth" was the ethical issue? You're right of course, at that point it's just cheese.
But purchasing those things creates the demand that someone somewhere has to put a living being through torture, a horrible life in a warehouse having child after child stripped away. And if you value the capacity for empathy of a whale, it's the same for a cow.
Other animals don't need to have the same concept of sexuality as people in order to be raped, I hope that's clear enough. We have animal cruelty laws against our pets for a reason. It may not be a sexual violation to them, but it is still physical harm. It is exploitation of another being that suffers.
If you did watch the standardized process of how we produce these things, which I've linked twice now, I think that more than sufficiently demonstrates harm. If the harm shocks you, maybe that says something about you, because there's no other way to present it. The machine lines of individual animals having their throats slit, dipped alive into boiling water, the cows struggling in the pens to avoid another bolt shot into their skulls.
And for what? A meat we can mimic with soy or pea protein? A cheese we can mimic with cashews? There's no rationalizing it.
I have a strong feeling you didn't watch it, and I can't make you, but it would give your arguments a lot stronger ground if you have the full knowledge of what you're talking about in the future.
Yes, this is correct. Continue purchasing meat. My stock portfolio thanks you.
:capitalist:
Most food production is for profit so your stock portfolio will welcome my purchase of kidney beans
Lower profit margin with less cruelty. Agriculture is a very boring category aside from GMO patents.
Yeah less cruelty is a good reason to avoid meat. Capitalists profiting isn't that great of a reason since they'll profit off of anything you eat
cows love when people take away their children. Cows love being killed. Cows love being forcibly impregnated and milked everyday, despite common infections of the udders. Just because you don't care doesn't mean they don't
livestock is not like children, because I say they're different
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I, as a good abolitionist, always avoid using cotton products and I do my part by shaming others into not using cotton products as well. This will surely end the system of chattel slavery in the South. Consumer choice is surely how systemic change, god forbid revolutionary liberation, occurs. Yes
I, a good abolitionist, oppose slavery in theory, but I won't free my own slaves because individual choices don't matter
Don't worry man I released all the pigs and cows I own already
I hope you actually sold them to recoup your losses. It’s only fair.
@jabrd - That was very much an actual abolitionist policy. Source.
It cut into cotton farmers sales, which was just terrible.
:capitalist:
It also didn't end slavery. Without grounded materialist analysis all of these discussions are just a morality circlejerk rather than a discussion of tactics/organization to pursue the political goal of animal liberation. That's why all the accusations going back and forth are about tone and privilege, there's nothing deeper there to discuss
Yes, yes, I agree. It is better to not take any steps against the machine unless it will fully solve the problem.
In the meantime, we must all accept things as they are and continue to purchase goods and services at a predictable and easily forecasted rate of profit.
Unless you're taking part in some organized political group that's actively pursuing the goal of animal liberation (and if you are, great job) you are taking no steps against the machine yourself. This lifestylism bullshit isn't saving any lives, it's just giving you a morality chub to stroke all over the internet
I am assuming you are doing this since you are advocating for it.
Animal liberation isn't the top of my political agenda. I take part in local organizations pursuing other goals. If it is your top priority then great, but I hope you're actually doing something about it other than buying the Che Guevara tee shirt equivalent of putting a "my food is grown, not raised" bumper sticker on your car
I sell Che Guevara t-shirts, I don’t buy them.
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Things don't need to be exactly alike in order to draw comparisons.
:capitalist:
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