I’d be very interested in the source for this…
America’s richest 10% are responsible for 40% of its planet-heating pollution
https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/17/business/rich-americans-climate-footprint-emissions/index.html
The emissions of the middle class are also a huge problem and will have to drop to 0 as well.
This is partially why most veganism arguments that try and say that we shouldn’t kill and eat animals and instead we should kill and eat plants usually fall on deaf ears for me just because it makes an implicit assumption that plant life is worth less than animal life
Animals don’t create biomass from thin air though. They have to eat a lot of plants to grow.
the production of 1 kg of beef requires 8 kg of feed and 14.5 thousand liters of water. For 1 kg of pork, 3 kg of feed is needed and nearly 6 thousand liters of water
Eating plants directly instead of feeding them to animals is clearly much more efficient, requiring much fewer animal deaths as well as plant deaths to sustain a human.
If plants are sentient, the moral argument for veganism is even stronger.
Much worse for who?
My point is: if police were completely abolished, conservatives and the far right would feel very unsafe and immediately form militias that enforce their values. That would be much worse for everyone who doesn’t share their values, of course.
I get that in many countries, police is badly regulated and you might say that this wouldn’t actually change much, but I’d rather seek more accountability for police, compared to a complete abolishion, leaving a power vaccum that’ll be filled by right wing militias with zero accountability.
Divesting seems good to me though, much of the police is certainly overfunded (due to law and order populism) and does useless shit (like the war on drugs), while education, social workers and programs against poverty are severely underfunded. Changing this would surely help a lot with crime reduction and other issues.
Thanks for the links by the way, I will look more into them when I have more time to see if my concerns regarding abolishion are addressed.
So what’s the alternative to police? Just getting rid of them would just lead to militias taking their place which would be much worse.
The good ones tend to do something in-between, with a market based economy, but good regulations, solid welfare, and democracy. Scandinavian countries have the happiest populations in the world, maybe we should try to learn from them.
Unfortunately corporations get more power over time instead of less. They have an ever growing pile of money to buy media and politicians to push their interests, that’s probably the greatest challenge of democracy.
How is this anti western? Pretty much every country in the world is capitalist by now.
I got really fucking tired of being called fucking stupid for buying meat free alternatives.
Sorry that you met condescending assholes. Some people just have the urge to feel superior over others for absolutely silly reasons. The rise of meat alternatives is one of the few things that make me optimistic for the future, along with renewable energy, electric cars and heat pumps. Factory farms are so much worse for the environment and animals, of course we should embrace alternatives to the worst option.
Prices also go down with more competition. There basically wasn’t any market for meat alternatives 10 years ago, now it’s growing quite fast. In 5 years, many of them will likely be cheaper than meat.
People live completely healthy without meat, so how is this relevant? Even if we were biologically adapted to hunting, that doesn’t make it ethical. Ducks are designed to rape, surely that doesn’t make rape ethical. Or does it in your view?
Raising animals for food is not incompatible with caring and making all humanly possible efforts to assure the animals live a good life.
People won’t ever stop buying from factory farms as long as it’s socially acceptable, or cheaper options with a close enough taste become available.
“Nearly 99 percent of farmed animals in the US are factory farmed. There are around 250,000 farms in the US. Every day, 23 million land animals are killed on these farms – around 266 every second”
https://animalequality.org/blog/2022/10/14/factory-farming-facts/
I don’t know a single meat eater that doesn’t eat factory farmed meat, including my former self. Do you really believe that people will suddenly start asking about living conditions in restaurants and supermarkets, pay a higher price, and boycot all factory farmed animal products? Speaking of romantizing. This seems like a complete fantasy to me. The vast majority will always buy the cheapest options they can find, no questions asked.
Defending the notion that systematic exploitation is fine, as long as you stab them “humanely” in the throat, provides the ideological basis for treating animals as products, reducing the cost by treating them as worst as possible. Like most people do right now.
As I see it, the only realistic way to end factory farming is if either plant-based meat alternatives or lab-grown meat are produced on a large scale to become price competitive. Which seems to be where things are going for many meat categories, although customer acceptance still has a long way to go.
Humans are animals as well. Just keep them as lifestock (e.g. on a cotton field or labor camp as we have done in the past), and killing them should be completely fine according to your logic. Who cares about the victims if we just declare them lifestock. Great ethics!
Unlike the other situations you mentioned I can point to a ludicrous amount of evidence that your body is made to sometimes eat animal proteins.
The experts would disagree.
It is the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics that appropriately planned vegetarian, including vegan, diets are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits for the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. These diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, adolescence, older adulthood, and for athletes.
not eating meat has been scientifically proven to reduce your health due to protein starvation
Citation needed
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
Now look at what humans do to cows, or even to other humans. We commit atrocities at a scale that no other species has ever achieved. According to your logic, humans deserve to be treated even worse than cows.
The neat thing is, you can add stuff like range checks and logging for getters and setters without changing every call. Separation of concerns is also vital in larger projects.
And when the milk production drops, the vast majority of dairy cows get their throat slit and their bodies sold for profit. I surely wouldn’t treat those that I love that way, but I guess animal farmers just have a very different concept of “loving animals” compared to people who have pets, for example.