Seems like they haven’t gained traction since the reddit exodus. I wonder how the other alternatives are doing. Lemmy has a decent amount of activity at least, although I still wish more people would use it.

“Haha, Nein.” - FDP

What makes you think that processing food through an animal is healthier than through a factory?

You have to compare the actual nutrients contained in the product to draw any conclusion about health effects, and the macros are fairly similar for the plant-based versions compared to a given meat product.

The average person (in developed countries) eats significantly more meat than the recommended upper limit by nutrition organizations.

If you just go by the naturalistic argument, you’d conclude that processed drinking water is worse than untreated water, and that vaccines are worse than “perfectly natural” diseases. It’s a common logical fallacy.

https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-nature

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. Or maybe he just doesn’t exist…

From the consumers point of view, you can only choose products that are in supply, so we think our choices don’t really have an impact. People often see it as a systemic issue that’s outside of our control.

From the corporations point of view, the consumer creates the demand and if they didn’t provide the supply, another corporation would. They also see it as a systemic issue that’s outside of their control.

The corporations love nothing more than the message “just consume our stuff and don’t blame yourself for any environmental impact. You can’t be perfect anyways, so might as well book a flight, buy a gas car, or buy our beef.” It’s so comfortable for both parties because they don’t have to change anything and can just point the finger at each other for the negative consequences.

Of course it’s sometimes necessary to do something polluting. People who need a car and can only afford a used car probably won’t be able to buy an electric one. I don’t even think that’s unethical consumption. But those who can afford an electric car and choose a new gas car instead do something unethical. Ultimately many of these practical issues will be solved as green technology matures, there will be cheap-ish used electric cars in the future, for example.

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.

But the majority of us loves our animals

And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.

This one isn’t human to human transmittable. It jumped to one human, but can’t infect other humans from there, so unless it mutates in a bad way it won’t start a pandemic. That’s very unlikely with one infection, but there will be more if it stays on animal farms.

It would take away breeding ground for human transmittable mutations. With literally billions of animals, mainly in filthy conditions, we just keep rolling the dice every day for a strain that starts a pandemic. We can either try to abolish factory farming, or just hope that the next pandemic won’t be much worse than covid.

Thanks for the elaborate response. It’s interesting how different considerations are at such remote places. Here in Germany, a place is generally considered “in the middle of nowhere” when the nearest small town is like 10 km away, and a 20 minute drive to the next supermarket is exceptional.

The cultural differences between rural and urban regions here seem enormous already, I can’t even imagine what it’s like in the US.

I’m not familiar with food deserts, but wouldn’t it be possible to order dried and tinned foods in bulk every few months to get more reasonable prices?

Payments were also reportedly made to politicians from other European countries. Without providing further details, sources stated that apart from Germany, the countries included France, Poland, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Hungary.

Damn, I wish they shared the parties and politicians involved.

I wouldn’t say they’re equivalent. Obviously beating a fly isn’t as bad as beating a dog or a pig. But is beating a human much worse than beating a dog? For me it comes down to capacity to suffer I guess.

That’s probably because you criticized their behavior (in a rather provocative way), which is often perceived as hostile and leads to downvotes.

Haven’t you been told that we don’t talk about that kind of oppression here? Everyone knows that mistreatment of humans is bad, but mistreatment of animals is just how things are supposed to be. They are just lesser beings after all, and such kind of thinking hasn’t lead to anything bad in history, so it’s not at all problematic.

Progressivism is about fighting oppression when it suits you, and meat is just soo convenient. The mega corps promised that nothing bad is happening there, so praise the factory farms!

I’d be very interested in the source for this…

America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html

The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.

Weird that this takes so long, with an ongoing war right here in Europe…