New farm bill would condemn pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates
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Meat is nice but would be better if we can skip the whole suffering thing
Not super interested in pink slime style concoctions either
Humans eat animals because they are a denser faster nutrition than plants. More bang for your buck. Trying to act like humans “only eat animals because” is ignoring reality.
As a whole, more humans are medically biologically incompatible with plant consumption than animal consumption.
Note that I'm talking about adverse medical reactions that range from worsening of chronic disease to acute death, not merely gastric discomfort, like with lactose intolerance.
Not everyone has the privilege of enjoying buttered cabbage.
But debrained animals are certainly more plausible.
You just need a miminum interface to keep their bodies running. Cruelty free meat.
also, you misspelled "meat" as "mean"
The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Raising animals for meat is theoretically doable with no suffering (not sure about milk), but it's not happening in practice. With pets the situation is better - a lot of people adopt and some care about how their pet was raised if they buy it from a breeder.
I also think we need to be careful with the idea that we should entirely avoid suffering because it's impossible to do.
I think most people are aware of animal cruelty in factory farms (the chicken in cages, the pigs in cages, etc.), which represents 90% of all farm animals globally (https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/global-animal-farming-est...).
For pets, I don't think you understood what GP was saying: pet breeding involves massive amounts of death of puppies/kittens that aren't pretty enough or don't manage to survive infancy, the female breeders are basically confined to cages and "producing" all their life, some short-nosed breeds of dogs and cats are even illegal in some countries because they spend their life unable to breathe properly, pets are abandoned and killed, etc. The happy pets you see in the street are not representative of what it is to be a pet. But yes, these ones are not suffering.
As for long and harmonious, as much as we tend to see anything in the distant past as innocent, I'd remind you that the systematic killing of male chicks, the killing of veals to avoid them drinking all the milk, the killing of all animals as soon as productivity drops beyond a threshold, are not new practices. No animal wants to be enslaved. Same as no human wants to be enslaved.
I'm not attacking you, just attempting to give you an idea of why other commenters believe animal domestication is not ethical.
Society is only concerned with cost, regulations are weak and rarely enforced and companies are operating in a capitalistic market where they can't compete unless they squeeze every last cent out of each animal. That's hard to change as lots of people have an interest in keeping the status quo and the citizens who vote don't have the time to read everything that comes their way. We can't expect that society will wake up, that people will start voting with more conscience or that everyone will go vegan.
Lab grown meat (or growing brainless animals or something similar) is a technological solution. When it becomes cheaper than normally-grown meat and similar in quality, the atrocities committed in the farms would cease to exist as the farms themselves would cease to exist. The same market forces that are responsible for what's happening to the animals now would prevent any future torture.
I find it hard to believe you could convince a large portion of Americans to eat lab grown meat just to save a buck.
But if lab grown meat is cheaper, some part of the population would buy it. The farms would lose part of their business so economy of scale would help lab grown meat and hurt the farms. I think it would lead to a feedback loop where lab grown meat will get even cheaper and farm meat would get more expensive.
With lab grown meat you also have the option not only for a perfect piece of meat, but for different kinds of tastes, textures and compositions that haven't existed before. Just like people eat processed meat (think ham or nuggets or deep fried pieces), they would love to try the new tastes. I know I would.
And to be glib, I'm not thrilled about the idea of catering to the bar set by "things they don't understand" from that group in particular.
Breeding animals _specifically for killing them_, no matter how they are killed, is not what I'd consider humane. If we take 'humane' literally, it means to be treated as you would treat a human. I doubt we'd do this to humans. So the only way to be okay with this is adhering to a form of specieism.
Not too different from humans in that respect; humans are bred systematically (we have dedicated hormonal supplements, birth facilities, documented birthing procedures, standardized post-birth checklists of forms of vaccination regiments, standardized mass schooling, government-subsidized feeding programs, etc) and most are used machinistically by society exclusively for productive output, regardless of whether the society is corporatist, capitalist, socialist, communist, etc.
But still, egg and dairy animals are culled when productivity drops. The human equivalent would be killing all male babies, and females after age ~40.
This does not seem more "humane" than the human equivalent of meat farming, where all human offspring would be harvested at age ~15.
And pregnancy is _hard_ on animals (including humans), it changes your physiology and psychology. Even if we take for granted that a cow isn't as conscious as a human (IMO consciousness is a sliding scale, not a binary), then they are still being primed for giving birth and taking care of offspring which never comes. Imagine doing that to a human - it's a definite form of cruelty.
It is not at all a logical, ethical, or emotional contradiction to say that we should have humanely-raised livestock whose purpose is to be slaughtered for meat. We can ensure that they are kept in healthy, safe, and humane ways during their lifetimes, and are killed as quickly, cleanly, and painlessly as we can reasonably manage.
And, um, the meaning of "humane" is only loosely related to "treat like a human." It means "treat well, view with compassion", and similar. We talk of things being "humane" or "inhumane" in how we treat each other, too. [0]
Humans have been raising meat animals with compassion and treating them well during their lifetimes for longer than we have had written language. Veganism/vegetarianism is not even physically an option for many people, excludes many cultures' traditional practices, and very, very often requires (or at least tends toward) supplementing with foods that are at least as unethical as factory farming practices.
That's the first time I ear about supplement being unethical, let alone "compared to factory farming". Stretching the usual arguments, it may be almonds' water or soy in brazil ? I'd be glad you clarify your point.
Soy is a strange pick at it’s mostly cultivated to feed livestock (77%) and using it instead for humans instead would require substantially less crops.
https://www.deforestationimportee.ecologie.gouv.fr/en/affect...
Agave… is mostly water and glucose, without much minerals or protein. How does vegs requires or tends toward that aliment more than other?
Quinoa original region doesn’t have the same working standards as un US/UE but I’m not aware of a difference with banana, coffee, avocado, cacao, vanilla, coconut, palm oil (or soy)… however Quinoa also grow in other regions: here in France you can find local quinoa at the same price as the one from Bolivia: around 8€/kg (organic). It’s super healthy but not very popular through.
Beans and lentils are more popular I think (self non-scientific estimation) but yeah soy is great and tasty.
I don’t think you can call it a compassion when you own an animal with sole purpose of efficiently growing it and then killing it so its body can be dismembered and sold off. This is treating animals as property, that produces profit.
Raising animals compassionately, slaughtering them for meat as painlessly as possible after a healthy, happy life
OR
Letting people who require meat in their diet to live (there are a number of reasons this may be the case) die slow, painful deaths as their bodies fail around them?
It's real easy to say that "no one should ever kill an animal to live" when you ignore the disabilities and chronic conditions that make surviving on plants alone impossible, or prohibitively expensive.
The obvious historical pointer to the Holocaust as a well covered example of people being treated like that - and a fact often swept under the rug: people are being treated essentially like that in North Korea, today.
An older interview but still good to watch
Instead people are outraged about the dictators in the middle east etc.
Whatever you wanna say about the Gaza atrocities - it applies 100x to North Korea. And yet, nobody cares.
I think that's the real thing you can take away from these issues: nobody cares unless there is a politically motivated party that wants to achieve their goals and thus shapes the public narrative enough to get it's will through
Wait, do we not agree that people are inherently more valuable than pigs?
Leaving aside pigs being intelligent creatures almost akin to humans for medical purposes, pigs fetch a lot more per kilo than humans do.
I'm not sure there's even much of an open market for human meat.
Unless you mean some nebulous human centic notion of "valuable" that takes no account of the pigs PoV.
It's so normalized to think of animals as worthless that I don't blame anyone for not having thought about it, but the moral calculus is really easy. Most people wouldn't be comfortable with killing a dog, and yet, every three days, we have two more Holocaust-worths of a smarter animal (namely, pigs).
If those animals would not be grown by humans, it could still be said that in their natural conditions they are grown specifically to be killed at some time, since few animals die "of natural causes", instead of being killed either by predators or by parasites.
For examples, my grandparents grew chicken. There is no doubt that those chicken had a more pleasant life than any wild chicken. During the day, they roamed through a vast space with abundant vegetation, insects and worms, where they fed exactly like any wild chicken would do. They also received from time to time some grain supplement that was greatly appreciated. They were not permanently harassed and stressed by predators, as it would have happened in their natural environment.
From time to time, some chicken was caught and killed out of sight. This would shorten the lives of the chicken that were not left for egg laying, but in comparison with the lives of wild chicken, most of these domestic chicken would have still lived longer on average.
So I think that as long as domestic animals do not live worse than their wild ancestors, this can be called as a "humane way", even when they are grown with the purpose of eventually being killed. At least being grown by humans has ensured the survival of the species of domesticated animals, while all species of not very small non-domesticated terrestrial animals have been reduced to negligible numbers of individuals in comparison with humans and domestic animals and for most of them extinction is very likely.
Unfortunately, today it has become unlikely to see animals grown in such conditions, like at my grandparents. Most are grown in industrial farms in conditions that cannot be called anything else but continuous torture, and I despise the people who torture animals in order to increase their revenues.
Also many domesticated animals would be completely extinct if we didn't eat or farm them, which isn't a great prize, but it isn't nothing either.
Personally I don't believe, until energy is so plentifully produced to be approaching on free for individuals, that we can even really afford to forgo animal agriculture. Oh yeah sure, we use farmland to grow animal feed and not human feed, but the animal feed we grow is often much easier to grow, and in many cases reduces artificial fertilizer usage which is a huge usage of fossil fuels. Take cows for example, they are fed 90% grass or alfalfa to grow, yeah their last month or two of life they are given grain to fatten them up (which is optional but customers prefer it), but that alfalfa they ate for 90% of their growth required no fertilizer or pesticides, and even produces nitrogen fertilizer in the ground, while harvesting consists of mowing it down and packing it into bails, and can be stored for years almost anywhere, including outside or in just random pits or 100 year old barns. Dent corn does require fertilizer (especially if you don't rotate with alfalfa or other legumes), however dent corn can also be stored for years with no more processing than is done within 10 seconds of harvest by the combine that is harvesting it, and can be fed to animals directly, while sweet corn is far more delicate, less fertilizer efficient, and doesn't store for long without refrigeration, canning, or freezing. Also animals like pigs are often fed otherwise bad or inedible food.
Meat/animals it also a great emergency store of food for disaster. A volcano can reduce global yields by 30%, and while crop subsidization will help as we might have an extra 10% growing to start with, that still may end with shortages because people keep fighting crop subsidization to keep it low not understanding why it exists (to prevent famine which it has successfully done for over 100 years in every country that implements it). But you can give yourself an extra few years of food from animal stores by slaughtering them down and feeding them on old animal feed stockpiles, either just to wait for overall crop yields to increase again, or to give time to increase farming efforts.
In a more ideal world I would definitely go along with reducing or even eliminating most animal agriculture, but in the world we currently live in it seems like a liability to me. I simply don't trust the people controlling most of our capital and wielding most of the power of human civilization to manage it well enough now or anytime in the near future. Not to mention the educational requirements to most cultures to switch to a pure vegetarian diet without all sorts of side effects from poor nutritional balance.
Well we got none of those things. But beef steak is still $25 a pound. I don't really care if it gets more expensive because at current prices I can't eat it regularly anyway and rich assholes will have no problems eating their steaks every day even at $100 a pound so why don't we just have a sustainable, clean, less cruel industry?
Countries reduced their demand of our meat, because of horseshit tradewar games, and yet the price went up. Demand for American industrial crops like soybeans, which is used significantly as a cattle feed, cratered, to the point we will have to hand the farms tens of billions of dollars, yet somehow beef still got more expensive. Meat processing uses illegal immigrant labor, sometimes even child labor, and all regulation of those facilities has dramatically curtailed under Trump administrations, and yet beef still gets more expensive.
Here's what beef producers say:
>“It’s hard as a beef producer to necessarily say that beef prices are too high. I mean, if people are paying $6 for a latte at Starbucks, but then they’re paying $6 for a pound of beef, they’re able to feed a family for a family of three with that pound of beef,” said Taylon Lienemann, co-owner of Linetics Ranch in Princeton, Nebraksa.
In other words, fuck you pay me. "Starbucks makes great profit so we should make more". The reason for the price increase is a "very small herd", which producers have been reducing because of droughts and otherwise because they don't think the profit is high enough to invest in future production.
> society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
Yes, and it's politically very hard to change. I totally understand price sensitivity around food. At least where I live milk and meat is extremely subsidised. How can you have chicken that is grown, slaughtered, cleaned, packaged, distributed, kept cold all the way, etc. and sell it for 5eur/kg (and cheaper on discounts). There's s much human work, resources, fuel used - I cannot understand.
Also - being a vegetarian/vegan is more expensive than being omnivore.
Being vegan is cheaper where I live regardless of whether we factor in the subsidies or not. Beans, chickpeas, lentils and sometimes soy (examples of protein sources) are pretty inexpensive. Peanuts, some other nuts (in the culinary sense of the word) and some of the vegetable oils are also inexpensive.
If you factor in foods meant to replace or replicate the taste of a carnivore diet like vegan yogurt, milk or cheese, or things like Beyond Meat burgers, it might become expensive, but you don't have to limit yourself by trying to replicate what you used to eat - you can make lots of things from 10-20 basic ingredients.
Being vegan is easy for someone who does hard physical work, so they have to eat more than 3000 kcal per day. In that case, eating enough proteins that come from plant sources will still leave enough in the energy budget to also eat other food, for a complete diet.
On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
I have eaten for 4 years only plant-based proteins, but to satisfy simultaneously 3 constraints, enough proteins, not so many calories as to cause weight gain and price no greater than when eating chicken meat, in Europe where I live there was only 1 solution, with no alternatives.
The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes. Any plant-based product that I could buy for enough protein would have been more expensive than chicken meat.
Extracting gluten, which is done by washing dough with abundant water, works. However it requires much time and much water. Extracting pure gluten requires so much water and so much time that I never did this regularly. I was typically removing around 75% of the starch from wheat flour, and with the result I was baking a bread that had about 50% to 60% protein content.
Besides wasting a lot of water and time every day, this procedure had the additional disadvantage that the amount of calories provided by eating enough protein was still rather large. This limited severely the possible menus, e.g. any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden. I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
These inconveniences have made me eventually abandon this approach. While I still eat mostly vegan food, I also use in cooking some whey protein concentrate, which can increase enough the protein content of plant-based food.
There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus. I hope that this technology will become viable commercially, because unlike with fake meat produced from cell cultures, it is certain that with such a fungal culture one can make proteins less costly than by growing chicken or other domestic animals.
The availability of such a protein powder would solve completely the problem of vegan food for me. I do not need fake meat.
> On the other hand, if you have a sedentary lifestyle, working in the front of a computer, it is impossible to eat enough protein without eating too many calories.
Anecdotal counterpoint - I've done hard physical work for ~2 years. For ~10 years before that and for about 1.5 after I stopped the physical work I've been spending most of my days sitting in front of the computer with the occasional walk to the grocery store. No sport or hiking or fitness.
I don't eat TVP or other condensed protein food. I don't count calories or even consciously decide when to eat protein rich food. Sometimes I'll even just eat pasta or other food relatively low in protein and rich in carbs and calories. Yet, I'm in the same physical health as I've always been. Not athletic, but normal weight - the type of weight an annoying aunt would see and say "ooh, you gotta eat more". :) The first BMI calc I tried put me right in the middle of the green zone (yes, I know BMI is not that important). And I could return to the same physical work if I wanted to.
Besides my anecdotal counterpoint, there are many sources online you can find where people discuss their diet, how much it costs and their lifestyle.
> The solution was to extract at home gluten from wheat flour, to supplement the proteins provided by lentils or other legumes.
> any starchy vegetables, e.g. potatoes or sweet potatoes or rice, and any starchy fruits, e.g. bananas, had to be forbidden.
That seems very extreme to me. Were you trying to be a bodybuilder or maintain some low body fat or something while maintaining this sedentary lifestyle? I eat potatoes, sweet potatoes and bananas all the time.
> I gain weight extremely easily if I exceed my allowable daily energy intake.
If that's the case, why not spend some of the calories on exercise? Although I find it hard to believe that with my current and previous sedentary lifestyle I expend enough calories to not care what I eat on a vegan diet, but you gain weight "extremely easily". Do you have some rare disease, if you don't mind my asking? Cause the only fat people I know are the ones who overeat, regardless of diet. Even if they start blaming "slow metabolism" or something else, it's obvious when you see them eat.
> There are plant protein extracts, but those are at least 3 to 5 times more expensive than cheap animal protein, e.g. chicken breast.
Economy of scale and subsidies.
> There already exists a technology for making whey protein concentrate otherwise than by the filtration of milk, i.e. by extracting it from a culture of genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
Interesting. Although I don't see myself buying it, I'll look it up.
> fake meat
It's as real as you can get. "Fake meat" would be TVP prepared like meat. You wouldn't say "fake whey protein" if you extract it from genetically-modified Trichoderma fungus.
I read this often but the long term vegs usually says the opposite as does the studies [0]. Bonus point: The veg options are often the cheapest in the non-vegan restaurants (although not the tastiest). I have some hypothesis where it comes from:
- Meat substitues are seen as a necessary replacement. They are transformed, which require more work - and therefore more expensive. However they are as (un)necessary as a fined-prepared piece of charcuterie, which isn't cheap neither.
- Cost is evaluated at the supermarket shelf but as you noted the animal products are extremely subsidised. Vegs pays for them but don't use it. Infrastructures like airport, rails, road and urban amenities are not free either even if you don't pay for them. How you evaluate the price is at your own discretion.
- Fancy products are placed in the most visible shelf and thats the people see first, but they compare it with the cheapest animal alternative. I'm an engineer and by my fancy organic tofu 7-20€/kg but used to buy chicken at 25-35€/kg in the same fancy segment. If I'd be on a budget I'll probably buy the bottom shelf one at 3.5€/kg, next to the 5€/kg chicken.
- Cost of change: changing habits require to re-create the optimization you build during the previous years: where to find the best price for the product X, what quantity should you get or what daily stable you can add in the routine for cheap (fake meat and fancy milk aren't).
0:
> Main findings suggest that food expenditure negatively relates to vegetarian food self-identity, and unemployment status mediates the link between vegetarianism and food expenditure.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-025-06353-y
Vegan diet is always the cheapest - but not in the lower income countries. However it is when including costs of climate change and health care.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
> The problem is that it costs slightly more and our society is more concerned with cost than animal suffering.
IDK about other livestock, but this definitely doesn't hold for chickens, one of the cheaper meat sources in the US. Switching to breeds that could live more than a very-few weeks(!) before getting too overweight to walk, would increase price by far more than "slightly more", and there's no hope of anything fitting any sane definition of "humane chicken farming" without that step.
I suspect it's also true for pigs, not necessarily the "we bred them so wrong that their very existence is a crime against god and nature" part but that the price increase from a "healthy, happy life" would be a lot larger than "slightly more". Maybe also cows, dunno about that one.
There is no humane way to kill a creature against its will.
To be clear, free range represents a major improvement over the unconscionable horrors of factory farms, but it is not flatly “humane” without qualification.
that YT video about killbots is being proved right in Eastern Ukraine right now
only a matter of time 'till those metaphorical chickens come home to roost
Ok but why stop there
If you support this, visit one of the handful of restaurants selling it to show interest and support the companies. The salmon I had was ready for prime time in the right context, and if you didn't know, you probably wouldn't have noticed.
I'd assumed it would mostly be limited to cultured ground beef and chicken nuggets.
It was in sushi. They're halfway cheating because it's not cooked, but getting the look right is very impressive compared to ground meat.
In a proper rending facility, a captive bolt pneumatic/hydraulic pistol punctures their skull and sends a shockwave through their brains, killing them like Tony in the last scene of the Sopranos.
From my own little box I think that that if lab grown meat was available and affordable, I would never eat a bit of real chicken, pork or beef again. I know veganism is an option too, but... I grew up with meat and it's very difficult to give up.
I hope that never takes off. I’m not eating that shit for sure.
In a hundred years (or less?) we will look back on meat from tortured animals with similar incredulity.
The abolitionist movement coincided with the industrial revolution. Maybe accessible meat replacements will have the same result.
How do you rebrand after people have already associated your product with past failed incumbents?
lab grown meat is cancer. Good luck eating that.
There is a need for something like it, though. A sow will absolutely lay down on her piglets and suffocate them.
This makes me really curious because that behavior seems very maladaptive for a species. That leads me to wonder if something else, ie. the environment or domestication, is leading to this behavior rather than pigs being really, really prone to wiping out their own species. Does anyone know why they do this in a farm environment?
There are a lot of environmental factors, like snuggling for warmth being unsafe.
But by and large... Pigs give birth in numbers. They can afford for half to die, and still proliferate. They don't need to be 'good parents'.
They reproduce very quickly - evolution is a numbers game, and yield isn’t part of the equation.
Some of the loss likely is due to keeping them penned up, however there are also losses for not keeping them penned up and letting baby pigs run among a herd of many adult pigs, some of which will attempt to kill piglets, especially females who have not had piglets yet. Pigs can be absolute viscous as hell and will readily eat other living animals if they think they can get away with it, including other pigs, and some mother pigs have been known to cannibalize their young even under ideal situations. Pig farmers have themselves been killed by pigs from passing out or getting knocked out in pig pens and the pigs seeing them as a free meal not to be wasted.
If you live in the district of one of these people you might consider contacting them to let them know your opinion.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/4673...
R- means Republican
This used to really bother me, but lately I'm thinking it is probably for the best.
Some people get caught in minutiae about downstream effects, I tell them it can go however they want (house pets are free or gone too, planes land harmlessly, etc)
In my circles, I've found it's about 50/50 button pushers to non-button pushers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, vegetarians are more likely to be button pushers.
Where do you think animals live?
I'm not going to argue with someone who works this hard to be a contrarian.
Species are not moral subjects. Individuals are.
Killing an individual animal that could live a worthwhile life for longer is an individually bad act. Insofar as this happens in the process of species going extinct, that's bad. But it's also the default state of nature. Does replacing a forest with a city cause net harm to non-human animals? That's not clear. It might even be net good.
Does that mean we should destroy wilderness on purpose to prevent wild animal suffering? Not yet, we don't have the technology to mitigate knock-on effects, and it should be done a way that does not harm individuals. But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole. (Some species have better lives than others).
> But I can't get behind viewing biome destruction as some kind of atrocity against the animals within them, at least not as a whole.
Well good luck with the doctorate I guess.
I’m not saying I’d be one to push the button, but I think it’s worth trying to understand the mindset of someone who would. It’s very arguable that pushing it would be the ethical thing to do.
One could argue there's a double count: about one-fifth of fish are caught to feed other animals (mainly fish, but also terrestrial animals). But I don't think one kill offsets another.
> around half of wild-caught finfish numbers are destined for reduction to fishmeal and oil, of which, respectively, 70 and 73% are used for aquaculture feeds
If you were locked in a room and being tortured, would you think it'd be appropriate for me to go: "they feed you at the end of each torture session, isn't it worth it to keep going for that?"
That's not true, though. There's no physical law that states that an X amount of suffering is required for an Y amount of pleasure. Nothing prevents you from taking a brain that's feeling pleasure and keeping it in that state. We don't have the technology, but it's not impossible theoretically. It's a configuration of neurons that somehow gives rise to qualia. Maybe in the evolutionary or day-to-day psychological sense we "need" suffering to overcome adversity and get stronger or not to become too content with what we have and lose it, but that's very far from a law of nature or a necessity in the real sense. And obviously some animals live their whole lives in bliss, others in agony. So it's not like there aren't any real life counterexamples.
I’m a very small drop in a very big bucket, and in the already tragically short time I am allotted on this earth, I would like to enjoy myself, thank you very much. I would not dream of asking others to kill themselves so that my existence might be marginally improved.
I don't think it's explicit, that's why I put the quip in there about assisted suicide. This thread is showing me that perhaps a lot of people would be okay with the "complainers" offing themselves but I'm not sure... my gut feeling is that a lot of optimists hold conflicting beliefs around this.
I don't want most "complainers" to kill themselves, nor would I recommend them to, but I support their right to. And if they showed me convincing evidence their life contains too much suffering to be worthwhile, I would agree with their decision.
But Most Vegans I Know (tm) regard human life as valuabe, speak in terms of harm reduction, and tend not to fantasize about making Vault Tec real.
I just think we are going to absolutely deserve the outcome as we collectively and metaphorically push that button... which we continue to do and are regressing on stopping ourselves from doing so a handful of super wealthy can watch gamified number go up.
Life is a gift. A painless life has no value. In fact, if you are genetically immune to pain, your lifetime survival rate is something like the teens.
Basically the idea is that if minimizing suffering is more important than maximizing pleasure, a world with no life would have no suffering whatsoever.
Regardless of whether you believe that, removing humans only would still leave the unfathomably huge amount of suffering of wild animals and after a while someone else will evolve and take the role of humans. However, if we leave humans exist, they could either destroy everything anyway (like with nukes or AI) or eliminate suffering like David Pearce and others imagine.
Did any one ever state that there was? Religious types will argue, but my counter is just humanity came up with religion as a stop gap in knowledge.
The older I get, the more careful I am to remember there's young people left in my wake and I get to decide whether I owe them anything or not - and, I make a personal belief that I do, a very great deal in fact. So getting comfortable that the whole system is damned and worth tossing is very convenient but too cavalier for me to find comfort in
I don't disagree with this at all, and on a personal level I do everything I can to reasonably leave things as good or better than I found them. I just no longer believe anything I do is going to pull humanity as a whole back from the edge.
I've always enjoyed that line. I also find it interesting how people interpret it. I take it to mean that each raindrop should still try to not cause a flood, and at some point, the flood will be prevented. Others take it to say there are simply too many other raindrops and they won't try, so there is no point in any drop trying. I don't care for that version.
As an Iowan, it is obligatory to show love for Herbert Hoover and our pig population when called upon.
But how can I comprehend people who eat meat and okay with killing animals, but get outraged by so and so practices of growing them? Isn’t it a textbook definition of inconsistency and hypocrisy?
And yet those people claim they have the concept of suffering (not physical pain).
Don’t you see inconsistency here?
They were treated not much different than a dog that eats grass, and had no idea they were food. The worst they knew is sometimes a new calf would appear, sometimes an old cow would be loaded up and drove away. All of them named, although they were mostly on-the-nose, our biggest cow was 2400 pounds and we called him Big Mac.
All that said, that is nothing what factory farming is like which is what most people are eating their food from. But there are ways to raise food animals "humanely", we did it for thousands of years up until the industrial revolution because it was the only way we knew how or could manage them. Without solid walls, hefty steel bars, and a cocktail of drugs and antibiotics when disease inevitably infects those overcrowded facilities, it is pretty difficult to keep most animals contained if they aren't happy, domesticated or not.
My pigs took longer to raise because it is winter here and I gave them lots of room to run. The pigs had a good life right up until their kill time.
The reason pork is so cheap is that overseas meat providers can break all of these humane rules we have in the USA. We badly need high tariffs so businesses don't just go around all of our environmental and labor protection laws by importing products from overseas.
And for reasons of arbitrary weight increase, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ractopamine is used in the USA. Doesnt degrade when cooked, so humans also get fat from it amongst other bad side effects. Banned in most countries, but not the USA. This is also why pork export is banned in most countries.
I know 1 person who is "allergic to pork". But European pork is fine. Even Canadian pork is fine. But what's different with US pork? Ractopamine.
To me, this is yet another reason why capitalism initially was great at making an economy, but profit-seeking behavior gets legally and ethically worse and one trades ethics for money.
Generally I look at EU for what's good/bad to consume though. It's scary how much stuff is banned there that's in everyday US products.
"European Union’s Parliament and Council, the bloc’s governing body, reached a provisional deal in December to “simplify” the process for marketing plants bred through new genomic techniques, such as by scrapping the need to label them any differently from conventional ones."
Ractopamine is used in Canada.
This sounds like a possible case of the nocebo effect: Someone experiences symptoms based on a belief that an ingredient is bad for them. When they consume the same thing without the belief that the ingredient is present, the effects are absent even though the ingredient is present.
This happens with people who believe they have WiFi sensitivity disorders, too. If you put them next to a WiFi router with blinking lights they will experience the pain of their condition. If you turn off the lights on the router but leave the WiFi transmitting, they stop feeling the effects.
Initially it wasn't that great either if you were a slave or worked 14 hours a day .
Hmm? Capitalism neither precludes nor predates slavery.
Neither system has ever existed in its purest theoretical form -- probably cannot, and even more probably should not.
I don't think this is a useful point of argument.
1:I really want to emphasize these as the definition of capitalism, because capitalism as is often defined is not designed top-down with the attributes identified in it. It mostly organically emerges from basic rights. Take for example the Marxist phrase "private ownership of the means of production." (POMP) One does not set ought to ensure this directly, it arises naturally from property rights and liberalism. One would need to prevent POMP by chipping away at property rights and personal liberties: by seizing things, by getting in the way of consensual agreements.
as i see it only socialist tendencies are fighting against that. (i don't mean achieving a full socialist system)
is minimum wage capitalistic or socialistic?
keep reading on wage labor and in particular on wage slavery, and how it relates to actual slavery. in my opinion neither precludes capitalism.
https://www.kcrg.com/2026/03/06/rep-hinson-speaks-iran-confl...
Work, Sleep, Eat. Your limited freedom is controlled by money which is earned by being forced to work in an office. The difference is your allowed to go home at X but must return at Y.
There are not enough consumers to care? Or maybe with legislation we get better outcomes due to scaling effects?
If we are willing to use legislation, could we tax such gestation crates, and use that tax revenue to breed unconscious pigs? Or find a way to disable consciousness in their brain? Or fund lab meat? I'm sure small labs are doing this, but if we are at the point of legislation, I imagine there is enough willpower to solve this problem rather than bandaids.
Also in an economy of rising costs, people are going to choose affordable options even if they might be vaguely aware of worse conditions happening somewhere else, far away from the grocery store aisle where they are making that choice for their family.
This is the kind of "big government libertarian" thinking that you only find on HN. It's like virtue signalling but the virtue is contrarianism. What you've suggested is more complicated, less ethical, less effective, and likely to be opposed by just about everyone across the political spectrum.
But I think I'd push back that this is less ethical.
All sorts of things are unpopular, but the masses can't logic their way through it.
I think "a provision that would condemn millions of pigs to a lifetime in gestation crates" is in fact horrific, however, outrage is the currency on places like X.
Posting a page number sounds specific, but then why not post the page (or quote it)? Particularly in any even remotely political environment where the default is "vote for (or oppose) this bill or you want [insert cute animal, baby, person, minority group] to die."
Just a tiny bit of source referencing could go a long way to help people better understand what you want them to support (or oppose).
The insane language in the sponsor's own press release tells me all I need to know about who the evil side on this bill is.
California prop 12: https://www.cde.ca.gov/ls/nu/fd/mb-fdp-03-2022-a.asp