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trolley problem
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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I cant really empathize with animals like how i can people. I hit possums with my car on the way to work all the time (once a month or so). Its unavoidable because they charge into the road and its too windy to move out of the way usually.
If i hit even one person id never live with the guilt and quit my job. Its unfair to expect 1 possum to equal 1 human. I understand you dont expect that. However, how many possums would i have to hit before it was enough for me to care much? It would have to be like when the cicadas come out - piles and piles of them for miles. I just value my husband having nice things more than the lives of those rodents, even though i like rodents a lot.
So the meat industry is basically a giant concentration camp of suffering, but im unsure if the suffering outweighs all the workers it employs, or evsn ths fact that they taste good.
At the same time, their suffering has value. Im excited for clone meat and i eat a lot of vegetables. It could easilly be that i cant empathize with them because of class consiousness similar to poor roman citizens not caring about the plight of slaves.
So, if veganism benefitted my class id be more enthusiastic in becoming a vegetarian instead of just using meat in moderation. It would have to be something about how me not eating meat or doing local activism for animals helps. I cant change society and me not buying meat wont actually help animals.
For example, my local activism was beneficial to people like me because it gave them a support network and community.
it's okay that sentient beings suffer because you think they taste good. you must realise how genuinely fucked up that thought is, right? what gives you any right to decide your favourite treat is more important than a life? animals feel pain. they have wants that aren't purely instinctual. their right to autonomy is more important than your desire for treats or a paycheck for workers - paycheck that comes at a heavy price, mind you. a job that requires mass killing has negative psychological and sometimes even physical effects on people.
at the end of the day, we're leftists because we believe that pushing suffering on the innocent is wrong. pigs, cows, chickens have done nothing to deserve death. buying their corpses to eat is completely out of step with the values communists and anarchists claim to hold.
My leftism is about better human social organisation for every human's benefit and reduced suffering. Beyond the practicality of ensuring a sustainable planetary ecosystem, it has nothing to do with other animals.
"My leftism has nothing to do with empathy or recognizing the suffering of others, it has only to do with benefiting those that I deem enough "like me" to be worth my consideration! Leftism is all about making things better for me and my kind! No, that's not reactionary! I'm not a chud! I'm a leftist, really!"
Feel free to go and busy yourself making the world better for rocks or something? You draw your own line at making the world better for things that sufficiently 'like you', too. I deem humans sufficiently 'like me', and there are plenty practical reasons for encompassing all humans in a just world, too. You just deem animals also sufficiently 'like you', but I don't personally see sufficient reasoning to extend that far.
you really need to self crit and think about why you think beings only like you deserve safety and freedom from oppression. that really is so incompatible with everything we talk about here
"Oppression and subjugation of a living thing is fine so long as it can't speak to me and tell me it doesn't like it. Extra points if it's tasty!"
There is actually adequate scientific evidence that many animals have a much greater awareness and emotional intelligence then we often attribute to them, this includes most if not all of our domesticated animals. You could argue that the act of meat eating isn't in itself amoral, but the mass suffering facilitated by the conditions within the meat industry certainly is. Not to mention the conditions it subjects its workers to. There is no ethical industrialized meat consumption.
yes, the labor conditions are something that harms people, especially in slaughterhouses.
do you think non-human animals dont feel pain
idk, what does "feel" mean? the ones with nervous systems and appropriate receptors probably have a stimulus response. do they have an experiential self that sits in that stimulus and dwells on it like people? do they have opinions about pain?
brb, chopping a cat's foot off without anesthetic
and that has what, exactly, to do with eating the cat?
you're not seriously doing this debatelord bit lmao
Because no life should ever have been born and no life should ever be born after this according to you, all sorts of cruelty and suffering and unnecessary death and environmental devastation are okay if you get le epic bacon and big car go vroom vroom. This is a tenable leftist position.
Says the ideologically pure antinatalistic clown that declared that all life that has been should never have been and that everyone alive today should not exist because they didn't sign a consent waiver before being born and that no future life should be born either, all while trying to justify "fuck you got mine don't tell me what to doooooooooooo" takes on everything from speed limits to dae le epic bacon. 🤡
Recognizing the capacity of animals to understand and suffer is basic science, not idealism. People with pets understand this and we know they should protect the health and well-being of the animals they keep. In fact, they often support laws requiring that pets are treated well enough.
But the moment it's a designated food animal, this goes out the window and brains shut off.
So anyways are you gonna eat dogs and cats or are you an "idealist"?
It has nothing to do with where I personally draw the line, asshole. It has everything to do with the scientifically established reality about who is capable of suffering. Rocks can't. Cows, pigs, etc. can. Just because your sphere of empathy is arbitrarily drawn to reinforce what's convenient for you doesn't mean that by necessity everyone else is so shallow, cruel, and morally inconsistent.