Cruel cultural traditions make (good) people support horrible acts. A tale as old as time.

Fortunately plant-based alternatives have been growing and improving quite fast for 10-20 years now, so I’m hopeful that even those who “could never give up meat” might stop supporting those hell holes. I was one of them, after all.

Kabecz have been charged with several offences, including killing or injuring animals; causing unnecessary suffering to an animal; failing to provide adequate medical attention for an animal when it is wounded or ill; inflicting upon an animal acute suffering, serious injury or harm, or extreme anxiety or distress that significantly impairs its health or well-being.

Just inflict the same things on “farm animals” and it’s not only socially acceptable, but the average person will gladly buy the products, and therefore fund the abuse on factory farms.

We certainly have a looong way to go to become a decent society based on that metric.

To me that’s more ethical than killing of billions of animals, and the latter is considered ethical.

I think most people would actually consider factory farming unethical, they just put the blame on the producers for treating animals like shit. And the producers are locked into a race to the bottom for competitive prices, so they’d blame the customers/market conditions.

It’s kind of funny, having the calves slaughtered to get the milk that is naturally meant for them is considered vegetarian (as long as you personally don’t eat the veal).

If they’re kept on abusive factory farms, that’s still vegetarian.

When the dairy cows gets their throats slit because milk production drops below profitablity after ~5 years, the milk is still seen as vegetarian (as long as someone else buys the meat).

No matter how much death and suffering takes place at the farm, the milk is seen as vegetarian. But at rennet, that’s where they draw the line.

I don’t know if I misunderstood you, but “making millions of people suffer horribly and needlessly for no fault of their own might just be the most ethical thing there is, you never know, so let’s not draw any conclusions about God allowing that to happen.” just seems like a rather unconvincing line of thought to me. It’s essentially just saying “God is always right, accept that”

I guess god just gave us the moral understanding that his (in)actions are insanely immoral to test our unquestioned loyalty to him, or he just likes a little trolling.

Sea level rise takes a lot of time. The projections I saw were somewhere around 1 m by 2100 and 10 m by 2300, depending on the amount of warming of course. I think hurricanes will be a bigger issue for them in this century.

Damn it

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering

I don’t know, life before the industrial revolution was pretty shit for regular people too.

I’d rather not have to worry about my family (and friends) starving to death during the next famine. 40-60% of children in medival europe died before adulthood. I can’t even imagine the psychological suffering caused by this alone. Then there was frequent war and disease outbreaks, basically no healthcare, and so on…

I’m not saying that everything’s great nowadays, we urgently need to fix many issues. But many things were way, way worse before modern civilization.

Now, your claim is that Russia started the civil war as a pretext to invade and that the separatists are just Russian proxies. On the other hand, the Russian narrative would claim the same thing about the Euromaidan coup.

I guess most the 400.000 - 800.000 Euromaidan protestors were CIA agents in Russias view then?

It’s well known that many people in Eastern European countries don’t trust Russia one bit after their experiences in the USSR. Of course there’s enormous pushback when politicians in power try to strengthen ties with Putin (and cut ties to EU countries), it would be really weird if there weren’t. The same would happen in Poland and many other Eastern European countries who were staunchly anti Putin long before the invasion, even though they don’t have an immediate threat from a shared border with Russia.

In my opinion, if people really cared so much about the Ukrainian people, then we should’ve been providing them with foreign aid for domestic development, long before any of this started.

Before the war, people weren’t really aware of the situation in Ukraine and there were 100 other problems that seemed more urgent, so there just wasn’t any political pressure to do something.

As far as I can see, it’s just about US/Ukrainian state interests vs Russian state interests

Western countries just stood by in the first days and did nothing, as they had no hopes for Ukraine surviving for more than a few days. If the Ukrainian public weren’t willing to push back, they would’ve had no chance to stop the Russian advances and their government would’ve collapsed in days, just as both Russia and the West predicted.

It would be a better use of funds to accept territorial concessions

Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians fled from the occupied territories, and accepting that they will never get their relatives and homes back will be unthinkable for a large part of them, especially after the reports of forced relocations from occupied regions into Russia (including thousands of children) and all the suffering that Putin has brought upon Ukrainians. Maybe they will reach the point of making concessions if they see no hope of retaking the territory. Ultimately this has to be decided by the Ukrainian people.

You said that they are a reactionary government, but you also implied that their reactionary justification to invade is legitimate.

You said you “don’t fully agree” with Russia intervening in the civil war (by shelling kyiv I guess, because theres definitely civil war there). As if they didn’t provoke it in the first place to justify their invasion.

I also wouldn’t expect people who are criticial of war to say that they “don’t fully agree” with Russia waging a war of aggression and commiting mass murder and war crimes in Ukraine, I would expect some actual condemnation of such atrocities.

Yeah, I don’t fully agree with their decision to intervene in the Ukrainian civil war

Of course Russia had nothing to do with the war. They would never fund and support the separatists, or spread anti Ukrainian propaganda amongst the Russian speaking population, because Putin loves democracy and just wants the best for everyone, of course. /s

Read the second paragraph again. I explicitly said that I’m not happy about their suffering, regardless of their political opinions.

It’s just disingenuous to claim that people merely take issue with their opinions when it’s the actions that are the real problem, although that still doesn’t justify schadenfreude.

This is “people with a different political opinion are suffering, yaaaaaay!”

To be fair, the issue isn’t that they have “a different political opinion”, the issue is that they will cause insane amounts of suffering and deaths down the line if they get their way. Climate change will kill millions of people, and trump and his supporters seek to make it even worse for short term political gain (aside from the attempts to install an authoritarian dictatorship and all that stuff).

That being said, I’m also not happy when indoctrinated people suffer, regardless of their murderous ideologies. Imo it’s more of a cultural issue, and nobody has any direct control over the culture/social environment that they grow up in.

BP and Shell only have that much power exacly because people buy fossil fuels from them. If demand would drop, their profits and political power would drop accordingly. As long as we don’t even hold the biggest financiers of these companies responsible, how can anything change? Demand drives supply.

It’s like saying “As long as hitmans exist, I won’t give a shit about the people who pay hitmans, all consumption under capitalism is unethical anyways so anything goes.” As long as we ignore those who actually fund the problem, we won’t be able to fix anything.

I got really fucking tired of being called fucking stupid for buying meat free alternatives.

Sorry that you met condescending assholes. Some people just have the urge to feel superior over others for absolutely silly reasons. The rise of meat alternatives is one of the few things that make me optimistic for the future, along with renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps. Factory farms are so much worse for the environment and animals, of course we should embrace alternatives to the worst option.

Prices also go down with more competition. There basically wasn’t any market for meat alternatives 10 years ago, now it’s growing quite fast. In 5 years, many of them will likely be cheaper than meat.