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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

I do think it cuts both ways; veganism is extremely strange. The strangeness does not prove that it is good or bad -- but absolute veganism (as perhaps distinguishable from other historically popular, frequently religious diet practices) is wildly out of line with nearly all humans in all of human history -- and could reasonably appear to be overly simplistic.

So, I think the "vegans that are complained about" are nearly always the folks who don't much take this into account.

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Conversely, it can easily be argued that it is paradoxical to normalize the slaughter and consumption of animals while simultaneously holding the belief that they should be protected (e.g. animal abuse laws).

Approaching how we life our lives primarily from an ethical lens can lead to all sorts of uncomfortable or strange conclusions, however.

Exactly, one day no human will consume meat. There are many reasons why but the popularity of it now stems from humans dealing with starvation--which we are still dealing with. If I have a variety of vegetables and grains I don't even think about meat. We are privileged to be able to not eat meat. It is something I give thanks for. We glorify it but the act of eating meat is not dignified. The time we can salvage any sort of dignity is by not killing the animal, not processing it, and eating only the parts that deemed worthy by our culture (the tender parts that chew easily).

"One day no human will consume meat."

If I had some time-travel-y way to bet my entire life savings against this prediction, I would.*

(*yeah, someone's going to get persnickety here. As long as humans are around, I believe some are going to eat meat.)

That statement is only supportable if vegans had a policy of annihilating meat-eating humans, which seems anathema to the vegan philosophy.

So maybe we can qualify that by saying "one day, no human will eat meat harvested from unethical or otherwise ecologically destructive livestock-farming practices."

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