learn your labels to avoid cruel producers, if you have the luxury buy from local farms

I feel like this is insanely hard to do this right, since the treatment of the animals is never made transparent. Even if you only buy animal products from local farms, how do you know the actual living conditions? You’d have to visit the farms and the slaughterhouses yourself, and even then you wouldn’t see all the stuff, like how the workers really treat the animals day to day and which procedures the animals go through, how they are separated after birth and so on. To get a fair, unbiased impression, you’d need to work there for some time, for every farm you buy from.

For food from normal restaurants (which aren’t $100 per meal), the employees have no idea where the animal products come from, and if they have to compete with the prices of other restaurants, well, it’s all factory farmed anyway or they would already be out of business.

Just buying the plant-based burger or whatever is just so much more practical than trying to be a conscientious meat eater in a world where you’re not supposed to ask any questions about how products were made. If you try to get some real transparency, the odds are stacked against you, and the industry will make sure to keep it that way. They’ll just push for some labels that make people feel good and that can be used for marketing, but don’t actually tell you much, and they know that’s good enough for most people.

As with any group, the most unreasonable ones who have a desire to shit on people are often the loudest and get disproportionately more attention.

That’s the same dynamic why conservatives think feminists hate men, for example. It doesn’t mean it’s representative.

Most vegans have been meat eaters for most of their life and didn’t went vegan overnight either. Many also recognize that going 100% vegan can seem very daunting to people who have never tried being vegetarian for a week or something like that yet. It certainly seemed daunting to me at first.

I now wish we could stop all factory farming today, but that’s not how human psychology works, and it’s not how societal change works. Some vegans aren’t emotionally able to accept that, but most probably will at some point.

The main struggle for the accessibility of vegan food is having more plant-based options in supermarkets and restaurants, and more people who are trying/choosing the alternatives (when they are available and decent) would go a long way to make it easier for all. So I’d always encourage people to take steps to improve the situation.

The “all or nothing” mentality just creates unnecessary barriers and some people really need to recognize that. People have to be able to take positive steps without feeling the need to make a big commitment.

Are the hundreds of millions of people who live without eating animals secretly reptiloid, or how do you make sense of that?

I know, but that’s the only way regular people get meat nowadays.

It’s also totally natural for humans to put those that we consider inferior into horrible death camps after all.

Der Titel ist etwas ungüstig. Das ist ein Bericht darüber mit welcher Strategie die AfD Arbeiter überzeugt und wie deren Wähler mit Gewerkschaften interagieren. Sehr hörenswert finde ich.

Ich hatte den Eindruck, dass Steinmeier als er meinte dass man die Sprache der Rechtsextremen nicht übernehmen soll, vermutlich auch Politiker gemeint hat. Diplomatisch bzw. vage bleiben muss er so oder so. Aber vielleicht betrachte ich das auch zu wohlwollend.

The animal rights logic is usually the following: Animals have the capacity to suffer and a will to live, therefore they deserve a right to not be harmed or killed needlessly.

No sane person would argue that they should have the right to vote or anything like that, just the basic ones. I feel like there’s a lot of confusion about this.

E.g. kicking a dog on a whim violates their right to not be harmed and should be illegal in an ideal world.

It seems like you share the ethical concern. Why wouldn’t you be in favor of granting them these two basic rights then?

Maybe your problem is with extending this logic to something like killing a pig for taste pleasure compared to kicking a dog? I’d argue that if you’re against the latter, there’s no ethical reason to defend or even support the former. Something being culturally ingrained or pleasurable doesn’t automatically justify it after all.

For the first situation, 3 h a day is a lot of time. I don’t think we should expect people to make such big sacrifices every day, at least if they work full time. People need leisure to stay healthy too. If it was 1h or 1:30h it would be reasonable to take the bike imo, but at 3h I’d cut them some slack. There are simply much more effective climate measures that we as a society should implement. They shouldn’t buy a new gas car if they can avoid it though.

For the second situation:

You want it so much, in fact, that not stopping there to buy a hamburger creates twice as much negative utility for you as biking instead of driving

But it also causes a lot more animal cruelty than the minuscule climate impact of one person commuting. Over the years, it would mean that many animals would have to endure an extremely miserable and painful life on factory farms with constant abuse and neglect, just to satisfy taste buds.

Compared to a warming of 0,00000000000000000001 °C or something like that, which has no measurable impact on any life on its own. Animal agriculture even has a larger climate impact than all cars on earth combined.

A more general analogy: By driving a car, you’ll do some miniscule harm to people and the environment. But if you’d knowingly chose to buy products that were produced in literal slavery conditions, and directly funded slavery that way, this would be a whole different ethical issue.

In reality, even if a person is addicted to burgers like a drug addict, they could easily buy plant-based burger patties that taste really similar to regular ones and make their own burgers. Vegan cheese isnt quite the same yet, but a little difference in taste certainly doesn’t justify torturing animals on factory farms. You still have essentially the same taste experience, especially after a small adjustment period.

In most countries, McDonalds even has plant based burgers available afaik.

If someone is literally starving and there’s only meat available, it can be argued that it would be vegan to eat it in that situation.

The definition from the vegan society is:

Veganism is a philosophy and way of living which seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of animals, humans and the environment. In dietary terms it denotes the practice of dispensing with all products derived wholly or partly from animals.

Is climate change cruel to animals? It’s not intentional harm, but it causes suffering. People will weigh that differently based on the ethical framework (deontology - utilitarianism spectrum).

Going on vacation by plane arguably isn’t vegan from a utilitarian perspective. Deontologists might still see it as vegan.

If someone needs to drive a car and can’t afford an EV, it’s not practical to avoid fossil fuels in this case. So that would be vegan either way.

I think the “avoiding as far as possible and practicable” principle also makes a lot of sense for the use of fossil fuels by environmentalists.

Who said capitalism isn’t a problem? I don’t see any comments claiming that.

Capitalism incentives the exploitation of humans and animals alike. It’s possible to recognize that both are a problem.

Its much weirder when leftists unironically believe that “animals are just animals, making them suffer is fine because they are inferior to me”, which is literally the supremacist thinking that racists and classists invoke to justify their mistreatment of other groups too.

I feel like lemmy.world is a bit shielded from tankies in general. I see some posts from lemmy.ml from time to time but rarely insane tankie posts. Engaging with political posts from there might not be the best idea indeed, maybe there should be warnings for those who are not aware lol

Welcome!

There are good Lemmy apps if you don’t have one yet. You can search “for Lemmy” to see most of them (in the Android play store at least). I like Voyager for Lemmy.

but like cmon, can we have SOME days where we can escape and just enjoy the internet guys?

You might want to block some keywords then, as there’s also a lot of American politics on Lemmy. You can filter most of it that way.

Since the industrial revolution, fossil fuels were the only affordable energy sources that could meet the demand of industrialized countries. Until 5-10 years ago.

We’re now in a situation where most people can still pretend that climate change isn’t serious, and the fossil fuel lobby is stronger than ever. And yet over 90% of new electricity generation is already renewable, because it has simply become cheaper than coal and gas power in the last years.

As climate impacts worsen, the pressure to decarbonize will only get larger. The lobbies have been fighting tooth and nail against the energy transition for over 40 years, but they are rapidly loosing ground now in most countries.

It’s right to be alarmed about climate change, there will be serious long-term impacts, but it seems irrational to be completely fatalistic. Just comparing the battery prices and solar panel prices and ev market with 10 years ago reveals a truly massive shift. And this is just the beginning of the energy transition.

20 years ago you could have said “Well, solar panels might be great for sustainability in theory, but the fossil fuel industry is so overwhelmingly powerful and solar panels so bad and expensive, it’s absolutely futile.”

Now, over 90% of added power plants are renewable, because there was at least some pressure to implement alternatives, and now they have matured enough to become economically viable on their own.

I think there are certain parallels to factory farming and plant-based alternatives + cultivated meat. We know that factory farming is very unsustainable, especially in terms of climate impact, resource use and zoonotic diseases (like bird flu and swine flu). These issues become ever more pressing as factory farming continues. We just won’t have a choice at some point but to switch to alternatives that are more sustainable, or everything goes to shit.

Creating demand for the alternatives funds their R&D and furthers their availability, which in turn leads to better products for lower prices, which makes further adoption much easier. Advancing the alternatives might have a much bigger impact than the mere reduction in meat consumption.

The more early adopters, the faster new technologies can advance. That’s true for every sustainable industry like solar energy, wind energy, battery storage, electric cars, and also meat alternatives.

If something doesn’t has a central nervous system and is therefore not sentient, it doesn’t make sense to attribute intrinsic ethical value to it. So I guess yes?

Do you really think that turning the machines off when someone is unquestionably brain-dead is murder?

These are truly bizarre things to take issue with.

But I think we both know that it’s unlikely that you’re deeply concerned about the ethical treatment of grass and corpses…

We know that our consciousness and capacity to suffer rely on our brains. Animals have brains with very similar structure, they avoid pain, they have long lasting and complex memories, there are clear signs of emotions (see: dogs), they have personalities, they play, some have emotional attachments to other animals or even humans, some animals show clear signs that they mourn the dead.

Plants don’t have brains, and we haven’t found any structures that are comparable. We haven’t observed any “behavior” that comes close to the capabilities that brains enable either.

There’s an enormous difference in the body of evidence. If this distinction is arbitrary to you, you might as well see a stone as your best friend, because they are surely just as conscious as we are.

This line of reasoning is very flawed. Lions regularly commit infanticide and dolphins rape, therefore these must be ethical things to do? It’s a classical appeal to nature fallacy.

“Yes I killed those people my honor, but tigers kill people too, and even my fellow humans kill other humans all the time, so it’s perfectly ethical if I do it too. It’s just my way to connect with nature!”

Would it be ethical in your view to cut the throat of a dog from time to time and eat the body parts, even if alternatives are readily available? The tiger has no other choice, and no moral capacity, but we do.

I don’t think that serious violence against animals without necessity to do so can be justified, and taking a life is one of the worst things you can do to a sentient being that doesn’t want to die.

Brb, gonna buy some organs from the black market. Sure, I know that it’ll fund further illegal organ harvesting, but I’m not responsible for what my money enables them to do, so no problem.