stickly
@stickly@lemmy.world
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 1 week ago:
I don’t quite understand what you mean by moral implications. Would I be upset if aliens started eating people? Yeah, that would suck. Would it be morally defensible to fight back in the same way a cow might kick? Of course. But I can’t consider their view because they are defined as a higher tier of being in this scenario.
You’re imagining little green humans with forks when it may just as well be a hyper-developed cloud of space bacteria. In their view, every human gut biome is a slave pit where trillions can be massacred at will.
Using us as incubators and then harvesting the “human” collection of cell resources is a perfectly ethical thing to do. Who cares about the shrieking sound waves and fluid that spills out while humans melt, that might as well be the smell of fresh cut grass. It’s just a bunch of clones of one DNA sequence vs the plethora of diverse cells unleashed from the gut. Easy decision.
Keeping us happy and healthy is crucial for the health of the gut biome, no need to cause any undue stress because that would hurt the final product. But of course, through gene manipulation or artificial selection they can make us into a more durable and docile species.
…And at that point modern humans are effectively extinct. I don’t have to worry about the ethics of an incubation vat in the same way you don’t worry about our bizzarre and unnatural domesticated crops.
the childish, optimistic look here really just highlights the compartmentalization you have to go through for a “coherent” position.
I’m totally lost here. You’re saying a comatose human is actually not a human but it is an animal (and therefore gets human rights)? My “higher thought” point is that our measure of life is relative to human features and human ability. A comatose human is very obviously still a human. Hell, even a dead human is still a human until it decays away and is recycled into something else.
Instead of silly screaming corn: What if I bred creatures that couldn’t express pain in any measurable way? Just sacks of flesh that you could herd around and harvest when they’re big enough. Slice off some reproductive piece and stick it in a tube to grow the next batch. Basically a meat tree on legs.
Is that unethical? Just because it’s gross? It’s no different than a plant. What if I told you I made them from pig DNA [no harm was done to the pig btw] but I cut out all traces of sensory organs that might convey pain. They can sense just barely enough to stand upright and only have the barest parts of a brain needed to grow more mass.
At what point does the distasteful husbandry become acceptable gardening? When the creatures can’t move? When the red blood is sap? Does the flesh have to be green instead of pink? Do the insides need to taste like a mango instead of bacon? Does it need photosynthesis like a spotted salamander or a sea slug?
Your position is incoherent if you can’t tell me exactly where the line is crossed AND that line is solid for all vegans. When does that lifeform gain or lose rights?
If you can’t do that or admit there’s subjectivity in the judgment then why can’t that subjectivity hold for cultures that bred dogs for food? Dogs are clearly not humans, but they’re too close to my personal experience of pets for comfort. That clearly isn’t the case with all humans, so I can’t pass judgment on the mere fact that a dog is eaten.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 1 week ago:
Yay I win!
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 1 week ago:
For the record I 100% agree with both of your positions in practice. We slightly differ on the topic of distaste for exploiting life.
IMO that’s a function of how many human features we attribute to the life and how we exploit it. Thus it’s very subjective and can only be looked at in the aggregate: slaughtering cows and pigs is distasteful because they bleed and scream like any mammal. Milking is exploitative but it can be a much less invasive process and a more fair exchange for a decent life of domestic animals. Think of the human job of a wet nurse, it doesn’t inherently have to be shitty.
I’m just here to rail against extreme positions like “all animals must have the same rights”. It’s such a seemingly benevolent statement that’s loaded with much more complex implications when you apply it to reality.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 1 week ago:
How’s the weather in your fantasy land? You winning your fight against that straw man? I didn’t say anything about over or under population, that’s a completely different philosophical discussion. That would be a debate over questions like:
- What quality of life is acceptable?
- Is putting a finite lifespan on civilization acceptable? If so, how long?
- Is it ethical to depopulate? By what methods?
- Would it be ethical to conserve resources to sustain civilization in perpetuity by euthanizing the infirm?
- What about a hard limit on personal consumption a la Logan’s Run ?
You are constricting your ethical ideal to automatically answer some of those questions. Here’s a rephrasing of our conversation:
- Fact 1: Humanity is confined to earth with a finite supply of completely non renewable resources [I’d encourage you to look into the impossibility of inter-planetary human civilization, the gist being that humans evolved for the specifically for Earth and it’s ecology; we’ll never have the energy and raw materials to reproduce that]
- Fact 2: There is a hard limit on Earth’s capacity to sustainably support life. This would be a carrying capacity in the low billions if all resources were dedicated to humans.
- Fact 3: Earth has 8 billion humans and counting. This is sustained entirely by a limited reserve of biochemical energy stored over millions of years. [I can get into the technical details if you’d like but there is no escaping the physical laws of entropy + our energy usage. ie: solar panels can’t cover the resource cost of more solar panels.] Depending on your thoughts on population management, this is either fine and we’ll just burn through our civilization’s resources or our population will be reduced by some method in conjunction with resource management to extend the lifespan of human civilization
- Fact 4: Humans evolved to fit a specific niche. This natural ecological role is as a primitive hunter gatherer, foraging in balance with other species. This minimal impact state has a far lower maximum sustainable population in the range of 10s of millions. Perhaps lower depending on how many modern life improvements you let expand the ecological footprint.
- Your ethical axiom: All creatures have the exact same rights as humans
This axiom automatically answers many questions raised by the other facts.
- If reproduction is a natural right in any capacity, humanity can’t ever ethically exceed earth’s carrying capacity. Until we reach a sustainable usage of our resources, humans must be equitably and fairly culled to preserve the rights of humans and other animals (because other animals don’t have the agency to cull themselves like humans)
- Civilisation must be sustainable or the rights of our progeny will be infringed by our own consumption
- The sustainable state must not infringe unnecessarily on the rights of other animals. This, defacto, limits us near our primal state described in Fact 4.
- Ergo: Getting to that state requires a 99%+ reduction in the human population. That low level of human population without access to our resource intensive modern tools is basically a collapse of civilization.
You can whine and sarcastically deflect but that’s the conclusion of your statement on total, universal animal rights. It’s not an undefendable position, but you must understand you’re pushing for a heavily restrained form of Anarcho-primitivism. If the concept of near total human civilization collapse for the benefit of other animals makes you uncomfortable (as it does for me), you’d want to reconsider that view in some way:
- All lifeforms have rights but our human existence requires us to value human rights above others
- Species suicide is the only ethical option because humans are the only creature capable of making that choice
- Any ethical framework for universal animal rights is unenforceable in reality even if correct. ie. The personal choice to harm another animal is unethical but the act itself is not. Indirect and accidental harm is more acceptable than direct harm
So I ask again, what’s your choice? There’s no free lunch.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 1 week ago:
If the advanced aliens had the control over us that we exert over animals then I wouldn’t have a choice. And whether I fight or not isn’t relevant to their choice to farm me. If anything it’s in their best interest to keep me healthy and content until I’m harvested.
Your coma example is laughable. They’re a human. A medical procedure (even if we don’t have the technology to perform it) could return them to normal function. Turning a cow into a human-like creature is a different discussion altogether, it would be a transformation at such a fundamental level that we might as well be discussing artificial personhood instead of the ethics of diet.
If we invented a procedure that could make corn moo would it no longer be vegan?
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
You’re still in denial here. There can be symbiosis in nature where species can cohabitate to the benefit of both, but that’s just two different niches being filled. It’s a completely orthogonal topic to species competing for the same niche. It’s not about building windmills and good vibes; human beings have overstepped our natural boundaries with billions of people in places we have absolutely no evolutionary excuse to be.
We’ve done this strictly because we can; it’s the natural animal inclination to favor your own progeny and expand your access to resources. Our ability to adapt has broken the evolutionary game. We won. The mere existence of 8.3 billion humans causes an unfathomable amount of harm that can’t be fixed by skipping “tasty meals”. That’s the ethical equivalent of whitewashing guilt and ignoring the structural problem.
So asserting something like “all animals have equal rights” is asinine. They clearly don’t, and we can’t change that without abandoning the 99% of human souls who stress the system beyond its bounds.
The carrying capacity of Earth is 2-4 billion people, and that’s assuming an ultimate human primacy with no regard to other species (except in the amoral ways they could sustain human existence). A “harmless” existence is a fleeting fraction of that, the small niche filled as hunter-gatherer megafauna mammals. This is a hard physical fact no matter what universal rights we put on paper. The choice is quite literally billions of human lives against trillions of birds/insects/fush/critters/predators/prey in conflict with them. There’s no free lunch.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
Plants don’t have to feel pain to be a lynch pin in the ecosystem supporting the animals around them. One less native plant is one less place to shelter or feed an endangered animal, or one less set of roots preventing the erosion of a habitat at risk.
Eliminating animal products mitigates the problem but it in no way absolves you from our exponential consumption of finite resources, and in many ways it’s naive non-solution.
For example: culling and eating pest animals like deer is not vegan, but leaving them alone with no natural predators does exponentially more harm to all other animals that depend on the native plants decimated by an unchecked deer population. Eliminating the predators is a human-caused problem but washing our hands of the situation will kill far more.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
Brother I am vegan (at least 95% in diet if you want to quibble over niche animal product additives). I’m just not going to shed tears over every single creature on earth like they’re my family pet while losing sight of the purpose of harm reduction. Why is the few grams of milk powder in your chips more important than mass deforestation supporting your avocados and coffee?
If most militant vegans actually examined their emotional arguments before they posted them people would take them way more seriously. Animals suffering and dying might make you deeply uncomfortable but that’s not a universal experience. You can’t browbeat people out of 15k years of animal husbandry just because you personally couldn’t stomach skinning a rabbit.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
I’m not the one making the dichotomy! I’m fully in favor of all harm reduction possible (including a vegan/utilitarian vegan diet) for the obvious benefit of our own species. The commenter above is positing that there is no ethical direct/indirect violence toward any animals. It’s impossible to hold that position while simultaneously pretending billions of people can exist.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. A simple rational examination of our limited resources is being discarded because “animals have human rights/you support slavery/you want animals to be raped”. No, I have a very obvious and consistent position:
Humans are a higher class of animal and being good stewards of our only planet is crucial for our own well being. We thrive with nature and unnatural violence (like industrial animal farming) is bad for our psyche anyway. That doesn’t mean animals can’t or won’t die to support our existence.
This stuff is so basic and fundamental; tradeoffs HAVE to be made. Pretending that the world can support life (let alone a good life) for billions of people without animal death/displacement/extinction is deranged. It’s on the commenter to pick up the shambles of that position and make anything that can fit in the real world.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
I reject your argument that life is a zero-sum game
Then you’re a fundamentally blind idealist or just lying to yourself. The absolute bare minimum, purely vegetarian footprint needed to support a human is about 0.2 acres (~800 m²). That’s 0.2 acres of precious arable land that could support dozens of species of plants, insects and animals purely dedicated to one human and their crops. A diverse and thriving array of life traded for one person and a handful of domesticated species.
From there you’re now looking at displacement and damage from housing, water usage, soil degradation, waste disposal, pest control and every other basic necessity. God forbid you get into modern niceties like health care, transportation, education, arts, sciences, etc…
Humans aren’t friendly little forest nymphs, we’re megafauna. Even the most benign and innocuous species of primates (such as lemurs and marmosets) peaked their populations in the high millions. Getting the human population down from 8.3 billion to a sustainable level is a 99%+ reduction. That’s a more complete eradication than any genocide in recorded history, let alone the sheer amount of death and scope of institutional collapse.
That’s just a flat fact of our reality. Either 99% of humans have no right to exist or humans are inherently a higher class of animal. Choose one.
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.
Uh ooooooh… someone isn’t familiar with how dependent our agriculture is on pesticides, petrochemicals and heavy industry 😬
We (currently) have ample oil and topsoil. Not ample sustainable food. Don’t even get me started on out other niche limits, like our approach to peak mineral supply or pollinator collapse.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
This is a ludicrous argument. If you truly believe that all animals have the same rights then the only internally consistent conclusion is the virtual extermination of the human species.
Life is a zero sum game. Something lives by consuming something else or displacing it for access to limited resources. Optimizing for the minimum harm to earth’s ecosystem is always going to be the end of agriculture, housing, hunting, industry and basically everything other human institution. We’re the most insidious invasive species ever and the world would be healthier without us mucking around.
So unless you’re stumping for that, don’t pretend to have the moral high ground. If you are, stop wasting your time shaming people and skip right to culling them.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
The differentiation “human” is artificial and made up…
You share 25% of your DNA with a tree, is it slavery to own four apple trees?
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
Why doesn’t my dog have a right to vote? Why can a snake eat eggs but I can’t? Why is it OK for ants to farm aphids but not for humans to farm cows?
Different things are, in fact, different. There are lots of dead simple and airtight arguments for veganism without counterproductive emotional appeals. Talk about economics or ecology or health and not about sad puppy dog eyes.
- Comment on "Being vegan is unnatural" 2 weeks ago:
Animals 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.
I don’t even think that statement is anthropocentric hubris. If ultra-advanced aliens showed up tomorrow and started domesticating humans for food or some other purpose, I would have the default expectation of them having the same or similar morals. Maybe we’d get access to decent healthcare and good libraries before we went to the slaughterhouse.
Cows get more rights than trees or crops because they have an ability to express pain and convey emotion. They don’t have the same rights as humans because they could never give a passionate argument for suffrage to a jury.
And to be clear: there are plenty of real, tangible reasons to end animal husbandry and make everyone vegan without even touching philosophy.
- Comment on EA invents new microtransaction nightmare as it breaks paywall promise on Skate: rent a playable area for 24 hours or buy a premium pass, bucko 2 weeks ago:
Using in game credits to rent content? Not exactly new, I remember that being the entire business model of EA’s Battlefield Heroes (circa 2009). That was only 3 years after Bethesda was first selling horse armor.
- Comment on Bacterial strain from 5,000-year-old cave ice shows resistance against 10 modern antibiotics 2 weeks ago:
Stop. Stop it. No. Bad scientist.
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 2 weeks ago:
Not sure where you’re reading that into my comment, the USA is right up there with most developed countries. Using that as a proxy for “culinary development” it’s in the mix with most European countries (coincidentally slightly above Spain by 2/3 metrics).
So you either subjectively hate USA cuisine for some reason or are unfairly comparing the two (eg. Average meal in Madrid vs
NYCMidwest McDonalds) - Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 3 weeks ago:
Again, 90% of the world doesn’t live in the culinary cradle that is the Mediterranean Sea and Fertile Crescent while also having the funds to support a diverse and interesting diet. About 30% of the world is food insecure. Rice, wheat and maize alone are about 2/3 of human caloric intake. 15 crops account for 90% of all human energy intake.
Food as hobby or art or cultural distinction is a rich country game. If you’re going to exclude special occasion (or “rich person”) food then you’re deluding yourself to think that food in the USA is worse than any but a handful of countries.
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 3 weeks ago:
I am not judging food culture based on what the rich can afford, or for one special meal. but for what everyone eats
I’ve got bad news then: 90% of everyone’s food fucking sucks. Hope you enjoy the fine cuisine of flatbreads, rice, and an occasional dish that stretches an animal protein so thin you forget it’s there. If you’re lucky there might be some months old fermented junk to season it.
Or maybe you’re just racist and assume that every noble savage has access to fresh fish, fruit and veggies year-round?
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 3 weeks ago:
Things like cane sugar could never grow anywhere near a Northern climate. If you want that to influence an entire continent’s food you can only do that through an account incredibly unfair deal (like cash crop colonialism).
You certainly don’t get a ton of culinary creativity when you’re paying a fair (read: expensive) price for goods grown halfway around the world. They’re too precious to be anything but a novelty for the rich.
- Comment on Students from Western Carolina University are heckled as they march to their new polling place - 2 miles down a busy highway with no sidewalks — after officials voted to close their on campus polling 3 weeks ago:
They don’t owe the school anything, in fact they’re probably paying a ton of money to be there. If anything, the school should be bending over backward to fight for them.
- Comment on There's still life left in them! 4 weeks ago:
- Comment on This is crazy. Why don't you just take their car ? 4 weeks ago:
Sounds like someone has never had to beat traffic to get to a second job… or a doctor’s appointment because your boss kept you late… or pick the kids up from school on time because you can’t afford childcare/after school activities… or get home to let a spouse drive the car because you can’t afford two cars or…
Being poor is expensive, time consuming and dangerous.
- Comment on This is crazy. Why don't you just take their car ? 4 weeks ago:
USA is so dystopian that not having a car can very easily fuck your life up. Tbh the big brother solution is still a better idea than cutting off a person (or even a household) from transportation to jobs/groceries/healthcare.
- Comment on Trump audibly loses control of his bowels during a press conference - via Forbes Breaking News 5 weeks ago:
- Comment on best part of the movie was when Xi said "IT'S PURGIN TIME!" and purged all over those guys 5 weeks ago:
Never ask:
- The USA why it has so many prisoners
- Saudi Arabia why they’re holding worker’s passports
- China why the number of state executions is a state secret
- Comment on This kid gets it 5 weeks ago:
Eh, people didn’t stop studying but the corporate capture of our governments undercut our educational institutions. People still study, but the resources devoted to structured foundational learning (ie. public schools) are now devoted to wealth extraction (eg. shortform video platforms).
Come on kids, lets learn all about how ivermectin enemas will cure your acne! [after this ad break]
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
I mean theres no objectivity to the way we describe the universe anyway
- Our society has arbitrarily landed on a base ten numbering system. This colors how we measure, but it could have just as easily been any other historical numbering system (12/20/4/60…)
- The length of a meter was chosen by the French based on the size of Earth at that time and relative to Paris. That obviously doesn’t work if you try to account for earth’s gradual shedding of mass or gaining mass via meteors
- The length of a second was defined as a fraction of earth’s daily rotation even though the rotation speed is slowing over time
- We have thousands of names for specific frequencies of visible light but don’t really bother for the other 99.9965% of the electromagnetic spectrum
- We still use classic binomial nomenclature for naming animals even though the whole system of taxonomic rank has basically been abandoned by biologists because evolution is too messy to classify
We basically just do things the way someone in the distant past decided to do things (though we’ve gotten better at defining them via natural constants).
The most clear, “rational” way to observe the universe would be with Planck units (ie. describing the universe within the bounds of our current theories of special relativity, quantum mechanics and gravity). But even that could be upended if we were to further develop/prove our physics theories. An alien race might show up and think our system based around discrete Planck lengths is primitive and quaint.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
My bad, don’t use Kelvin all that often 😂
Just joking around, but setting a scale is just a matter of fixing zero and choosing the size of your degree. So -50º would be halfway to absolute zero and 0º can be any reference point you want.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
Lmao no disrespect intended but I hope you take a break for some self care, we’re on a meme post and I’m pitching a hypothetical temperature scale that will see zero implementation or adoption ever. I think it’s fun to play with and debate but there’s no need to get heated about it
