significant white space to it’s classist and racist

Significant white-space is bullshit and i will die on this hill.

I’m not sure a strictly maths based ethics is the way to go, that’s where you get into sociopath greater-good style considerations like “If i take out the managing team of <Big Meat Corp> , eventually they’ll recover but i’ll have saved approximately X animals in the meantime”

Don’t get me wrong, i’m not against that kind of thinking, i’m just not sure it’s a viable long-term lifestyle.

In order to produce 1 steak, a cow has to die.

In order to produce n steaks 1 cow has to die.

Arguably it’s probably slightly more than 1, given the morbidity rate of cows before they reach the “food production” stage.

In order to produce 1 phone, many different people have to work to produce it, enslaved or not.

In order to produce 1 phone a non-zero number of people will (likely) be maimed/outright killed while working under slave labour conditions.

If you include the more realistic cost/benefits i suggested above does that change the calculations involved for you ?

The following is an aside to the main conversation:

It was been pointed out that some electronics are as good as necessities for most people, while i think there’s a subjective aspect to “necessity” I’ll concede some electronics use it’s not the same as meat consumption. Though i would further argue that under today’s food production and distribution systems, meat consumption could be argued to be a necessity in some situations.

But that’s almost certainly an entirely different conversation.

In reference to my other conversation regarding the comparison of products that use electronics vs meat consumption, I would ask if “convenience” was a valid justification.

Given the horrors of the electronics supply chain (slavery, horrific working conditions, cartels etc) im not sure why convenience electronics (phones, laptops, pc’s) use would be OK, but meat consumption would not.

Im not saying the horrors are equivalent and it’s not a dig at you, I’m genuinely trying to figure out why one kind of horror is OK, but another is not and how people make those calls.

Hope this helps <3

It does and your points are valid, but i’ll respond to a couple if you don’t mind.

Honestly, if someone is truly aware of the horrors of the animal agriculture industry and is totally fine with it, I would be very, very surprised.

As would i (outside of the sociopath possibility you also mention) , i was thinking more along the lines of people who fully understand and then accept it as something they can live with.

The comparisons of the meat industry to electronics i mostly agree with, except for this last part, not because it’s incorrect as such, i just didn’t provide enough context.

Melting metal, pouring it into moulds to make circuitry, etc. doesn’t hurt anyone directly, it’s capitalism and the drive for maximal profits which cause issues in electronics. I’m a huge proponent for the abolition of capitalism for this reason too.

I mentioned electronics because it’s easy for people to at least shallowly understand how much they use them, what’s not so obvious is the horrors of how they are produced, in a similar way to how people as a whole don’t really understand how the meat industry is run.

Long before the metal pouring and assembly you have the rare earth elements industry that uses horrific limb-removing slave work camps to extract these minerals. it’s not all of them, but it’s significantly more than zero.

There are also cartel like warlords involved in some of the extraction sites.

Think of it as a similar situation to conflict diamonds, but more entrenched and critical to nation state interests.

I mentioned cobalt because it’s the easiest to find credible documentaries, reports and discussions about, but it’s not just cobalt.

Honestly a lot of the big industries are supported by modern day slavery and inhumane conditions or experimentation, i would also assume that extends to the non-human animals as well but i can’t honestly speak to that.

Textiles (clothes, shoes, trainers), agriculture (avocado’s have cartels because of course they do, coffee), pharmaceuticals, non-meat food (chocolate for example).

I keep coming back to the phrase “There is no ethical consumerism under capitalism” which aligns with your stance on the abolition of capitalism, but i tend to think of it as there is no ethical consumerism in general (at least right now) because i can’t think of a way we could ethically overcome the sheer density of population using the level of logistical technology we have available and that’s not even taking into account the (subjective) apparent nature of how human’s deal with such large populations.

But me not being able to see how we make the jump from now to a post scarcity, fully equitable society is almost certainly just a failure of my imagination.

My main question is how do people seem to be able to decide they can live with limbless kid electronics but slave labour clothes are too far, cartel avocado’s are an unfortunate necessity but meat is monstrous.

I understand that not all of those things are equal and battles need to be picked but it doesn’t seem like the subjective severity is the deciding factor and how are the battles picked.

See my reply here for context on why i asked

and then , once they acknowledge that ?

The reason i ask is that I’ve never heard an opinion from someone with the viewpoint it seems you hold talk about what they’d think in that situation.

and my follow up would be to ask why meat and not electronics (explained below) or textiles or megacorps ?

In general i struggle with why people place these ethical and moral rubicons in the places they do (i do mostly understand why the lines exist)

I mentioned in another comment about the horrific shit that goes in to basically all electronics (there are numerous documentaries and articles on the horrors of cobalt mining for instance) and it seems odd that people are ok with that but not the meat industry, or perhaps fine with both of those but draw the line at baby animals.

Again, i understand why the lines exist, it’s the seemingly arbitrary nature of where they are placed for different circumstances that eludes me.

I’m asking so i can gather opinions enough that hopefully i can understand, eventually

OK, so if negative fucks were a thing, that would be how may fucks in general i give about the actual argument you are having.

That being said, to me it seems hypocritical to be throwing shade about intentional animal cruelty unless you are somehow posting these replies without using any electronics whatsoever.

Almost all electronics require materials sourced or processed off the back of rare earth minerals not even mentioning the supply chain and assembly.

As you said, people are animals too, slavery and workplace mutilation are animal abuse.

I’m not whattabouting your argument, both things are fucked up and one doesn’t cancel out the other and as i said, i’m not supporting either side.

but the stunning lack of awareness (or acknowledgement) of the hypocrisy of your argument is offensive.

Real question, what if there is no cognitive dissonance.

Like someone who knows exactly what’s going on and says “fuck it, it’s delicious” ?

Ah the tried and tested “it’s ok if it’s my property” which historically(and currently) is a universal guideline for what is and isn’t ok.

TL;DR;

My only point has consistently been that your statements lacked important supporting context and are written like they are the only correct option, that weakens them.

Questioning your weak statements seems to have upset you and rather than actually responding to my only actual point you’ve constructed multiple other positions i’ve not taken.

When asked for examples you moved to “you are discussing in bad faith” (still no examples , i might add).

A discussion is impossible with someone unwilling to engage (or unable to understand) the actual position of the other party.

The rest is just a long winded version of this, feel free to skip it.

Literally nothing is required. What’s your point? Are you just trying to argue about nothing? …

My whole point, which i have stated multiple times, is that your statements are weak.

things like “and it does need to be done.” implies that it is the only answer, when it isn’t.

There is a problem with lead bullets. There’s also a problem with a lack of natural predation. We should try to solve these problems. We don’t have to solve any problem, but what’s the point in starting arguments with people online saying we don’t need to solve anything?

Again, point to where anyone said we don’t need to solve anything ?

If your answer to someone questioning the validity of your statements is to say “fuck it, obviously you just mean we shouldn’t solve anything” then i expect there’s nothing further to gain from a conversation.

I had to go back to see what was said. I didn’t say anything was special about it being natural, like what you implied by saying it was magical. I said it’s kept naturally healthy by predators, as in nature had a mechanism to keep it healthy. This isn’t an appeal to nature, as you implied. It’s a statement of fact. It isn’t saying natural is better. It’s saying there is a natural thing. Doing it without nature accomplishes the same goal. So you did “quote me” in that you used two words I also used, you didn’t include anything else surrounding it, and made it say something it didn’t.

I literally quoted the surrounding sentence in that reply, not just the two words, if you didn’t read it , that’s on you.

As i’ve said, multiple times, there are mechanisms in place for balance and/or collapse, healthy is subjective.

As I said. We could wait for evolution to take its course. I don’t think waiting centuries with booming and crashing populations of animals is a particularly smart idea. Maybe you do, but you haven’t said anything other than “we don’t have to do anything.” Again, no shit! Stop writing these long comments saying literally nothing.

In your reply to me, yes, in the original response, not so much, which again i will remind you is the actual issue i’ve been mentioning this whole time.

My original reply was basically , “i don’t agree or disagree with your points but perhaps add context so your arguments aren’t so brittle” everything after that is responding to your questions. Its seems my responses aren’t to your liking but i’m not sure there’s anything i can do about that.

I’ll add a TL;DR; for you so you can skim.

No, we don’t. We don’t need to discuss magical fairies taking care of the problem. We don’t need to discuss finding a magic lamp to solve the problem. Some things can safely be ignored because they’re so unlikely to happen.

I never said discussion was needed, i said that ruling out options is a part of how decisions and policies are made, if you think magical fairies being ruled out requires discussion, that’s on you.

In the actual context on this thread of discussion i think that artificially increased predation could be (and historically has been) a viable solution to overpopulation.

Ceding areas to wildlife has also been used.

I said specifically that a shitstorm would probably be the result of dropping our current measures without a replacement that doesn’t mean other options can’t be discussed.

And that whole reply was again to point out the statement you made was an implied objective fact.

You aren’t making any argument besides that we should do everything but discuss how to solve these issues.

I mean…no , i’ll quote my repeated statements of my only arguments :

I don’t know if it’s on purpose but your answer seems to be ignoring a lot of the realities of how the things you are proposing would work (or not work, as the case may be).

I don’t necessarily disagree(or agree) with you, but i absolutely think your arguments need work.

My only argument has been that your statements were omitting what i would consider important context.

and then in this response

“i don’t agree or disagree with your points but perhaps add context so your arguments aren’t so brittle”

If you want to attribute some other argument to me (that isn’t a direct response to your questions) I’d appreciate if you could point out where it was made.

This is my last reply unless you actually want to have a discussion. If you do, discuss in good faith. We do not have to rule out things that can’t reasonably happen.

All of my responses were in good faith, if you don’t understand that dismissing something because it is unlikely is literally ruling out an option i can’t help you with that.

We should assume that suffering is at least somewhat negative.

I don’t know what you mean by this but I’m fairly sure i haven’t argued to the contrary.

We should assume that environmental experts saying prey populations need to be culled are correct.

Again, i haven’t argued against this, only that it’s not the only option, as was implied by your statements.

If you don’t agree to these, there isn’t a discussion to be had.

I agree, “If you don’t agree to these things I’ve unilaterally stated to be true with no contextual support or citations then your responses are in bad faith” isn’t a discussion, it’s a personal echo chamber.

Yes. That formal enforced regulation needs to exist, and I don’t know anywhere that it doesn’t. In the US, you need a license, and you can only kill a certain number of the animal per season, and that’s all based on how many of the animals need to be culled, and it does need to be done. Equilibrium is maintained through this regulation.

Animals don’t need to be culled, for the maintenance of the current pseudo equilibrium it’s probably a good idea, but it’s not an absolute requirement.

I never said “naturally healthy”

I literally quoted you.

I said they evolved to have a certain percentage of losses. If that isn’t maintained by other predators, we need to do it. It’s naturally (in its current state) unhealthy. Hunting is required to keep it healthy.

Hunting is the one of the current mechanisms we use to (roughly) maintain the status quo, it’s not the only mechanism, nor is it the only option, it’s just one of the ones we are using right now.

Healthy is relative in multiple ways, there would be a new equilibrium on the other side of the shitstorm that would probably arise from us dropping our current efforts with no replacement.

That might be subjectively bad for us, but it would exist.

Sure. That’d be another solution. If we’re discussing policy, I think we can safely ignore it though. There’s a lot of solutions that are not going to happen. We don’t need to rule out all of them to discuss what we actually can do.

Unless there’s some sort of magic book that already has the answers to what is and isn’t viable then we very much do need to rule them out, that’s how decisions and policies are made.

No. They boom and collapse. This repeats, until evolution takes it’s course maybe, which will be quite a while. It doesn’t reach an equilibrium state because they evolutionary pressures were different when they evolved. Maybe this isn’t true for all prey animals, but many, such as deer and rabbits, it is. Population booms, they eat all easily available food, they die off from starvation or disease, then they boom back.

I’m not sure what the no is about given the following sentences basically say the same thing i did.

If they aren’t fit they die off, a new equilibrium is reached or the ecosystem collapses.

“They boom and collapse.,This repeats, until evolution takes it’s course maybe, which will be quite a while.” is one way an equilibrium is reached if the species(singular or plural) don’t die off.

A lot of your argument against hunting is that it requires regulation. No one is arguing against that. It is needed, and this is already recognized and enforced. We just need to now enforce participation in a way that doesn’t create negative externalities from lead poisoning.

I’d be interested to see where you’re seeing an argument against hunting from me as, afaik, i haven’t said anything to that effect.

My only argument has been that your statements were omitting what i would consider important context.

Sure, you can hunt without guns. I don’t really see an argument for not using them though, as long as there’s no lead.

In the isolated context of lead poisoning alone, sure, banning lead is an answer.

In the greater context of gun ownership in general, it’s more tricky.

But i wasn’t advocating either , simply pointing out that banning guns and allowing hunting aren’t mutually exclusive.

What’s really the ethical or environment argument in favor of only allowing bows, or whatever?

There are some , but i wasn’t pushing for any so i’m not sure they are relevant here.

I see the emotional appeal, if people have a negative view of guns. Not a logical appeal though, besides maybe making them harder to access to prevent deaths by firearms.

Either you haven’t thought this all way through or you are intentionally ignoring the whole host of other emotional and logical arguments around gun control.

If you can ban hunting with firearms, you can also just ban using lead ammo, so I don’t see how banning them is the best option in general.

As was said previously, in this isolated context you are probably right, in any kind of wider context, not so much.

I didn’t make any proposals in my above comment. It’s entirely statements of observations. I don’t know what you mean by saying you don’t see how they would work or not. I gave explanations of why hunting isn’t negative, and is often positive, but not any proposals of how anything should be done. Would you care to elaborate?

That’s possibly my bad, i meant more that you were making statements without any (written) consideration to the wider context in which they were made.

I don’t necessarily disagree(or agree) with you, but i absolutely think your arguments need work.

Examples:

I will preface this by saying that my perspective on “nature” is that we are part of it, even will all the fucked up self destructive stuff we have going on , so it’s not like we can really do anything “unnatural”, i use the term natural below to mean nature if we didn’t have such an outsized effect on natural processes.

From an environmental perspective, hunting keeps pray populations in naturally healthy levels, since most of their predators are driven out of populated areas, because people don’t like to be attacked by wild animals.

That’s only true in an ecosystem where the predator (us) and the prey are in natural equilibrium, which I’m sure you’ll agree is absolutely not the case.

Without that natural equilibrium you need formal and enforced regulation to make this work.

This magical “naturally healthy” state of existence glosses over a lot of problems with that statement.

It also doesn’t consume many resources, as they’re just living their lives in nature.

Also requires a natural equilibrium or regulation as a baseline.

I don’t think there’s any valid argument against hunting honestly, besides just being grossed out by it. I can’t construct a good argument against it though, and I suspect you can’t either.

Overhunting and ecosystem collapse, trophy hunting, selective hunting (think ivory), disease control, hunting for “sport” (think fox “hunting”).

Those were just off the top of my head.

and remember animals dying and being eaten is natural, and frequently necessary to maintain an equilibrium that was evolved to be maintained by external factors

an equilibrium, not the only equilibrium, it also mentions evolution of equilibriums but is presented from a perspective that the equilibrium presented is now fixed (it is not).

we are also animals, so us dying and being eaten also fall under this, so by that rationale another effective solution could be to reintroduce more (non-human) predators and a few of us die here and there, but the animal populations now stay under control.

Deer, for example, will die horrible deaths of starvation, and do damage to the environment, if they aren’t hunted by humans.

Until a new equilibrium is reached, because that’s how ecosystems work (or collapse, depending).

“Damage” is relative and a natural part of the evolution(or collapse) of ecosystems.

Crazy ape comment aside (i’d put it closer to apes with delusions of grandeur but that’s just me), not shooting guns and allowing hunting aren’t mutually exclusive.

Especially given all the hunting that happened pre-gun.

I don’t know if it’s on purpose but your answer seems to be ignoring a lot of the realities of how the things you are proposing would work (or not work, as the case may be).

Probably not one that stands up to scrutiny.

If they have fixed programming, the bias would be consistent, but still there, because it would be based upon systems that are already inherently bias.

Any current ML system is beholden to the data/constraints it was built with, if inherent bias exists in the data it will exist in the resulting system.

That’s before you even start taking in to account the infrastructure that would be managing them being potentially corrupt or having their own interpretations of “public safety”.

“These bots from <generic third party> are bringing in more cases against the <“good” people>, but these ones from <tech company with the same bigoted ideology as us> can be tweaked to target the <“bad” people>, which of these two companies should we purchase our inventory from ?”