this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2026
884 points (97.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
12215 readers
3147 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How's that messed up? This is literally how the natural world works. Predators eat prey. We are the apex predator species.
Natural does not mean we should do something? Cannibalism is also natural, but we rightly find that horrible
Brushing aside moral considerations, cannibalism leads to things like kuru, so that's a no go either way.
I have no qualms eating animals, provided they weren't factory farmed.
On a related note, it's worth mentioning that factory farming is the vast majority of global meat, dairy, egg, etc, production
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-estimates
https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/us-factory-farming-estimates
That's why I prefer New Zealand or Australian lamb. Just lamb living their best lamb lives out on pastures.
Can't wait for deer season this year so I can restock on venison.
New Zealand's pasture based systems aren't exactly the idealistic visions people have of them. Even just environmentally, their attempts to scale them up have required huge amounts of fertilizer and lead to huge amounts of pollution. For instance for their dairy production:
https://theconversation.com/11-000-litres-of-water-to-make-one-litre-of-milk-new-questions-about-the-freshwater-impact-of-nz-dairy-farming-183806
Damn, guess I'll just keep eating 100% factory farmed then.
You can always stop eating meat
That is the next stage of the purity test, yes, but I have a sneaking suspicion that OP wouldn't be satisfied with that either.
I was going to reply to your earlier comment, but I'm now seeing there is little interest in any good faith discussion
Since your comments in this thread clearly show you aren't interested in good faith discussion in the first place, I'm perfectly happy with you not replying to my comments.
My comments, which are heavily sourced and cited, show that?
Yup. Very, very clearly, because you refuse to even entertain the idea that any form of eating meat can be an ethical choice.
All of your comments here are obviously propaganda, and so by their very nature are not intended to be in good faith.
Given that any meat a normal person consumes is produced unethically in deplorable conditions, I don't think it can be the ethical choice. If you raise the animals yourself and kill them quickly and humanely, sure. Or even go hunting and eat the meat. Fish and eat the fish. Otherwise, I don't see how anyone could contend it's ethical.
My dad is a conservative red blooded american, and he rarely consumes meat because he has worked in and around a number of factory farms of varying sizes. From chickens, pigs, to cattle. It's all produced in truly abhorrent ways.
Your attitude betrays some level of cognitive dissonance imo, but what do I know, I'm just a lemming.
I got downvotes for mentioning I'm planning on taking some of our overpopulated deer.
Maybe we should reintroduce wolves instead, eh?
hey you're more merciful than the wolf
Cool opinion bro.
And you'll certainly make sure that you stay that way, I'm sure. That's kinda the point of my above comment.
Anytime you engage in discussion without leaving open the possibility that your position could be wrong, that's propaganda, and is intentionally not engaging in good faith.
I think i'd be more apt to consider your opinion if you were less aggressive and had posited a single argument. Dismissing something with a hand wave isn't exactly a convincing argument. I'm open to hearing how you believe modern factory farming and meat consumption is ethical in your framework
edit: I even posted the ways I would find eating meat ethical -- I don't really understand the anger and hostility
I never said that I believed that. My original comment was only intended to call out OP's bullshit purity tests and the negative outcomes that will result as people grow discouraged and give up from having someone belittle what is very clearly an intentional effort to be better.
We're all doing the best we can.
I would hope most people are, but the reality is that we consume staggeringly more meat than ever before, by an order of magnitude. It is possible and even less expensive to consume a vegetarian diet, given you are blessed to live outside a food desert. I hold no judgement for folks existing in a terrible system and worrying about things other than animal welfare. This is a result of systems beyond the average person's control, and more than likely, knowledge.
To say that we're doing the best we can is untrue in a vacuum. Perhaps education on the topic of animal agriculture would enable people to make choices that are kinder to animals, earth, and themselves.
I have no interest in consuming a vegetarian diet - my only ethical problem is with factory farming specifically, and on that front I'm doing the best that I can considering all of the far more important problems currently facing society.
I personally feel that convenience and personal taste is less important than the suffering of billions of animals. Your personal taste has a small impact on the total suffering, of course, but the sum of meat eaters taken together creates the demand that necessitates factory farming.
If you voluntarily consume meat given the means of accessing the alternatives, then I say the choice is not ethical. How you or anyone else personally weighs that choice against other concerns is up to you. I'm posting this from a phone more than likely made by children working untenable hours. When I discard it, it'll likely pollute a poor country. I know we have to pick our battles, so again, no judgement. I do like to discuss these things though! :)
I don't believe that meat consumption has to involve (much) animal suffering, and I'm in favor of taking steps toward that goal.
Hopefully lab-grown meat will take off soon and the whole argument will be a moot point.
Thanks for the conversation. :)
I too want lab grown meat! Anyway ditto - cheers
We were talking about how dominant factory farming is, and how things that try not to do that do not scale. The response to that was to ignore this and throw up hands and say "eh, guess we can't do anything". Am I'm supposed to instead assume that one has to eat meat and ignore that we don't have to?
No, that's what you were doing, and I wasn't putting up with your purity test bullshit. My response is what most people will respond with when confronted with "All of the effort you're putting in to trying to be better has been completely wasted because it's not perfect."
We're all doing what we can.
There's another option you never considered: reducing consumption and reduction. I would very much say reducing consumption is a step toward a better world. I'm not going to tell someone there efforts are wasted if they're doing that, I'm going to encourage them to keep going further
I meant within this conversation. The options you presented did not include that and made a false claim on my beliefs
I understanding that everything I say is being distorted through the lens of anger, but please don't make the worst interpretations of what I am saying
I want you to vision the future you want to see. If the future in your vision is, at minimum, a world without factory farming, that's going to require massive decreases in animal product consumption and production. That's going to take require action from all of us to get there
Who doesn't love dying during childhood?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
I mean, there's no rule that says that one must consider nature, as a whole, to be ethical. It's perfectly possible to believe that nature itself is "messed up" in a moral sense and merely outside the capacity of humans to change for the foreseeable future. One's own behavior is much easier to impact by contrast.
I would even argue, that nature as a whole, cannot be ethical, since the ecosystem is essentially build on organisms eating each other. And nothing outside human experience can, really, if we get to technical nitpicking. Ethics are things created out of human mind, they do not exist outside us... Anyway, that does not mean you cannot aim for being as ethical as possible. Since ethics are real to us, if we want to be Good, we should all strive towards that.
Extending human ethics toward non-humans is a questionable endeavor at best. That being said, I personally don't like extra unnecessary suffering, which is why I prefer eating humanely raised and killed animals.
Taking the minimization of suffering to its logical conclusion, however, animals suffer in the wild without human intervention, so the most humane thing to do would be to exterminate them all. This would prevent any future suffering entirely.
Surely you see a problem with such a utilitarian approach?
The thing is, minimization of suffering is not the only thing to consider in ethics, it is a very complicated matter. For example freedom, the individual's right to decide themselves, is often considered at least on par with it; deciding to kill something, because you think it is best for them, is not often seen as very ethical.
Personally I think there just is no single solid ethical Truth, that decides what the Good is (since ethics are human things, and humans are far from infallible or all-knowing), it is more of an ongoing discussion, about what that means. But we should still strive towards that Good, even if we are not quite sure what it is, or change our minds about what it is. In fact, a person thinking they are absolutely sure something is Right, is a sign, that they should not slam that door shut. Only a sith deals in absolutes, essentially lmao.
My argument is that from a utilitarian viewpoint it's not just best for them, but it prevents future suffering for all their offspring. Not just the suffering of one, but of untold millions.
Obviously I don't think a utilitarian approach like this is the right way to proceed.
And my point is just, that valuing that utilitarian viewpoint over other things, is not a stance a lot of people consider ethical. It is a choice, to end up with that being the "end result" of ethical thinking - there is no single right answer. Someone might think that the suffering caused to an individual, by them being killed without consent, weights more than potential suffering that might happen in the future. Then we get to how we define suffering. And then... ethics are always a mess, with only increasing amount of difficult questions, and no "absolutely correct" answers to any of them.
WILL happen in the future. Is guaranteed to happen in the future.
Not even sun rising tomorrow is guaranteed, in philosophy.
Hoards ravaging neighboring communities and killing everyone up to the children is perfectly natural for humans but you don’t have to do it.