Read my other answers.
286 karma · joined October 5, 2025
My comment here is arguing against casual, and especially unbased, bigotry against men. Which your comment demonstrates.
Drive-by shittiness makes the community worse. Do better.
My point is that, whatever your papers assert, the differences on carnism, in absolute terms, are so insignificant on the political/gender spectra that accusing one side on this basis can only be seen as having the only purpose of attacking that side, not of genuinely wanting to see meat consumption reduced.
When you look at the data (or when you don't eat meat and regularly debate randos about it), you will see it's not a conservative/liberal, man/woman thing, but a generalised disregard for animal life. So turning it into a culture war just makes it worse, because the conservatives who read your attack will be likely to start seeing it as part of their identity while liberals will do nothing, so in total this worsens the issue.
A big part of my debates on this site is about animal cruelty, so I'm not defending those who eat animals here, only pointing out this approach is both a lie on numbers and bad for the cause.
> justified in bigoted
You seem to think that bigoted means having a negative view, but it's actually "obstinate and unreasoning attachment of one's own belief and opinions, with narrow-minded intolerance of beliefs opposed to them". The unreasoning part and acting on prejudice is what I'm saying is bad.
I answered your comment because it was purely about gender, nothing political, and because the claim about social media posts being a major barrier was nonsense.
Yes, there are political underpinnings to eating animals. I assume you're American, so here's a gallup poll for the US:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/510038/identify-vegetarian-vega...
Since this is about America, it's about right vs liberals (so not left), and indeed they're 3 times more likely than conservatives (9 vs 3%), and indeed women are 2-3 times more likely than men to be vegetarian/vegan (6 vs 2%).
But we're talking about tiny, tiny percentage points. It's the same across the entire West. So singling out men, or even conservatives, for a tiny difference feels like antagonisation with no basis, and your comment reads not like arguing for climate or animal welfare, but as fighting your culture war. And everyone outside of your bubble will see it for a weak attack and dismiss it as just a vehicle for your favourite flavour of bigotry.
Hence why dropping it would have been better.
As an aside: women are the vast majority of leisure travellers (>70% for all travel, and much higher for leisure only). Women are probably 99% of consumers of fast fashion, and the majority of consumers of smartphone updates. The gap is much starker, and seeing it as a culture problem would be justified in discussions about pollution (though not socially acceptable...). But if you were talking about, I don't know, the externalities of coffee production, and women/liberals drank 51% of coffee and men/conservatives 49%, and you complained about women, I'd also just dismiss your comment as bigotry.
You're talking about eating plant protein, what's the point of throwing in an atack on men, even a subset of them? Or do you really think that the main thing that bars us from eating less meat or any other kind of utopia is some evil men doing "or something" on social media?
Your comment could have stood on its own without throwing your bigotry, or ignorance, in to unnecessarily antagonise people.
I hope the Parliament doesn't buy the story about protecting critical infrastructure.
Some will say it's just for their own quality of life when they're reading LLM output, or "just for docs", but this is an extremely marginal use case.
I don't have data on the West specifically, but I'd be surprised if it's not 99%. "Free range" animals are largely a fiction.
Animals being used for pasture grazing, for the benefit of the climate, could be understandable, but I think enslavement and torture of 200+ billion animals annually is a moral failure that goes far beyond its effects on CO2 ppm.
However, the constraints that most people have to contend with do not allow them to be more radical in their calls for change. You saw it in the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests uprising in France, that was motivated not by the passion for IC engines but by the inability to weather the costs of taxation on older vehicles.
The real culprit is far and away corporations that benefit from activities that carry with them extreme effects on the climate, and who can influence both politics and media. The research (sorry for lack of link) that shows that political direction is largely controlled by moneyed interests is not ambiguous.
I do agree that the populace also deserves some of the blame however: regular renewals of electronic devices, and especially the continuing consumption of animal products, is a moral failure justified only by pleasure.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260712212920/https://scrapfly....
So you don't seem to stand by anything apart from swindling.
https://hackread.com/encrypted-email-provider-tutanota-backd...
However, Proton is leaving Switzerland, because of changing legislation, to Germany.
You might as well have said that without advertising, we wouldn't have charities, freedom of thought, and literature: the argument is as strong and might make you feel even better about yourself.
Oh, turns out that you did say that advertising solved slavery in another comment. Carry on, mate.
Your objection appeals to emotions, not to reason. The very kind of objection that has enabled fossil fuels to be seen as less dangerous. FYI, nuclear energy has killed single digits of people. Fossil fuels kill around 10M annually through pollution alone.
Granted, your lament aims to make people privilege clean energy over nuclear, but in nature it is still the kind of thought-terminating fearmongering that gets us surveillance to protect children, so I object on principle.
The Middle-East's bad record on human rights can be traced back to in large part to the meddling of the US, because it serves the interests of Israel and because of oil. In the time of Nasser, the Middle-East was a different place.
FYI, a typical 1GW nuclear plant produces 30 tons, or 10m3, of high-level waste. Germany uses ~500TWh of electricity per year. So Germany could replace all their electricity generation with 60 nuclear plants and would need to find space for 1800 tons or 5km3 of waste per year.
For comparison, German landfills can accommodate 70M metric tons per year.
France, a country famous for its investment into nuclear, is not covered in nuclear waste, and does not seem to have any issue disposing of it safely.
Nuclear has its disadvantages, but painting the many people who advocate for it on HN as delusional or ignorant is not very respectful.
Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to view the world in terms of race, tribalism, and might-makes-right: even if those you accept to be the unfortunate bystanders are different from who they were historically, I'll concede that you are fully in line with the American tradition.
And same as with the pre-2008 (per your comment) American tradition, it's an ideology that will make the world a worse place. Shame.
[0]: https://sprites.dev/
Granted, America's been leading on encouraging the worse angels of our nature for the last, what, 70 years? But these personalities exist everywhere.
Unrelated to this chat, but I wonder what your political leaning is, just to understand where this aggressive defense of the EU is coming from. I assume you're not left or right, not radical in any direction. Would you describe yourself as moderate/centrist/Starmer's Labour/Macronite?
If the government of Denmark really wants to implement this, let them, but the idea that a tiny country's officials, elected by a population of 6M that their media managed to convince of the utopia to come when privacy doesn't exist, manages to make another 450M in 26 countries comply to their will (not to call it delusion) is frightening.
Are you planning on opening access to Phosphor?
There's a reason "who will think of the children" is ridiculed: there's no evidence that this is the intent or that there are outcomes. Everything I've read to date shows that surveillance is not effective in curbing CSAM, that the people (and especially organised crime) that engage into such activity are not using plain text and twitter to talk to each other, that those solutions that are known to have outcomes are not being invested in or enforced, etc.
The EU is handicapped by its very diversity on this. Imagine the situation where the EU is integrated, and the government wants to pass Chat Control 2.0, or some equally unsavoury measure. Imagine that some people or orgs manage to whip up the people of the Netherlands into protesting in the streets against it: it's extremely unlikely that Poles or Spaniards would be able to build a protest movement on top of that, if they were even aware of it, because of language and national sentiment ("it's just some people over there being angry about whatever, and mainstream media says there's nothing to see there, or that they're evil terrorists, and I don't understand their funny language enough to check").
There are some promising moves towards a EU-wide party in Mera25 for example (if I understand it correctly), but it's ultimately a party for English-speaking, basically well-off, educated, currently left-leaning, young people, which is nothing that one can build a deep movement on.
When you vote in your elections, you almost certainly know who's going to lead the country.
Not so with the EU: look up Spitzenkandidat method and the deviations from it, including von der Leyen in 2019 being parachuted into her post not based on any vote.
What I see people (Europeans) lamenting is how undemocratic the EU is. As much as I think von der Leyen should be imprisoned, the issue is not the people in the government, but the institution itself. The Commission and the Council are the ones pushing these things, every time.
The people in government are bad, and there's no reason whatsoever to think that'll improve amy time soon: what prevents bad people from doing bad things is the regulatory apparatus of checks and balances, which the EU very much lacks (in parts, granted). Worse, it has introduced US style corruption (or "lobbying") into countries that historically lacked it.
If Chat Control 2.0 passes, given the general direction this would be showing, I'd very much understand people wanting to exit from the EU and cut the amount of undemocratic bullshit they have to contend with.
But to return to your point, when something people strongly reject happens in their country, they do, rightfully, advocate for the dissolution of that government. Much harder to do with unelected bureaucrats sheltering in another country.
To the people.
There are many ways to restrain the Council that'd make the EU more democratic: enforce more/full transparency into the Council's decision-making, expand the powers of the Parliament (making the Council into the upper house basically), enforce the Spitzenkandidat method for appointing the EC President, allow referenda on major issues to bypass the Council.
None of these is perfect, but they would streamline the democratic processes within the EU by lessening the role of the Council as intermediary.
I agree that the Council themselves would never allow that however.