I’m a vegan and I actually partially agree with your sentiment about “quick death + no pain = maybe not too unethical”, and that’s actually the justification I used for a while to defend why I wasn’t vegan.

Just know that this view is not inherently incompatible with veganism. Go vegan because of the way the animals are treated while they’re alive. Also, most animals are not killed without suffer.

Cows for meat are possibly the only animal we eat that actually sometimes get decent treatment, if they’re pasture raised with no growth hormones. But non vegans act like this is significant. Only about 3% of cows get to live their entire lives on a pasture. I would commend someone if they actually held a strict rule that they only ate pasture raised beef, but I’ve never met anyone like that. That would mean you could never order beef from a restaurant, you could never eat beef your friends made, etc. unless you’re 100% sure it was pasture raised. Because just about every other cow had to live it’s entire life in a space so small it can’t even turn it’s head and doesn’t get to see outside.

That being said, virtually every other animal product does not have that going for them. Chicken is never pasture raised (too expensive), their lives are absolutely atrocious and the vast majority of the time they are killed by being hung on an assembly line upside down.

I’m not going to go into all the details but just know that, even if you do hold the belief that it’s okay for an animal to die if it is quick and painless, that you can still recognize that veganism is correct.

Please don’t let your experience with vegans push you away from it. There’s plenty of reasonable, kind, and understanding vegans.

Also btw, rescuing a shelter animal = vegan, buying a bred animal = not vegan.

Him hitting you out of nowhere with a passive aggressive “are you vegan?” was not the move, but you have to recognize a bigger picture here.

When animal abuse happens, and people see it, they are disgusted by it. It makes you feel awful inside, it makes you empathize with the animal.

But when animal abuse happens and you don’t see it, people don’t seem to care. I mean, what this fellow did to his dog is absolutely atrocious, but frankly it’s mild compared to the 25 million chickens killed daily (USA alone), who are often hung upside down in assembly lines for hours, not to mention the atrocious living conditions they had beforehand. And that’s just the surface.

Rather than passive-aggressively questioning your ethics like the other user here, I instead urge you to explore these feelings you have about animal cruelty, and think about what happens even when you don’t see it.

Lol I figured that out shortly after typing my comment, hence deleting it

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Your very slightly incorrect internet comment has ignited me with a passion to correct you. The interval in Killing in the Name is not nine half steps, but rather a minor 9th, which is 13 half steps.

I hate to get so semantical but using the word pedophile incorrectly just desensitizes the word. Pedophilia means being attracted to children, primarily meaning before or in the early stages of puberty, usually younger than 13. In fact, many pedophiles would not be attracted to someone aged 15+ because they are typically exclusively or primarily interested in prepubescent bodies.

That doesn’t mean this guy isn’t a total asshole, but he’s not a pedophile, and I think anyone can understand an adult sexting an older teen, while still absolutely horrid, is quite different from sexting a child.

Once again, absolutely not defending this guy, I don’t even know who he is… but I think it’s important not to desensitize the word.

Summer. Especially at night. I feel like summer nights are always the perfect temperature, makes up for it being too hot in the day.

This doesn’t legalize weed, but arguably it’s a step in the right direction.

Okay but there’s a moral hierarchy when it comes to eating meat. Humans used to hunt, meaning we would kill animals that lived natural lives. Not to mention, we would typically target animals that were older or sickly, because we would have a harder time killing animals that are in their prime.

That’s so much different from modern day agriculture practices. We raise animals in fences so tight they can’t turn their heads, and feed them nasty stuff. We abuse the shit out of them until they reach the point where we deem them the most profitable then we kill them. There’s nothing natural about that.

Also, it’s really hard to know for sure, but we have a good amount of evidence that humans didn’t eat that much meat. First of all, the animals we hunted wouldn’t be nearly as fat as the animals we eat today. Secondly, there’s evidence that many humans ate roughly 100g of fiber per day, which is not possible if you had any serious amount of meat. Humans ate a lot of plants. 100g of fiber is an insane amount of plants.

Honestly I feel like the idea of “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism” is so lame. Like I understand that you could find something technically ethically wrong with everything, but that statement just feels like a way for people who don’t want to give up certain things to justify themselves.

Capitalism, especially modern day capitalism where the government and companies collaborate, does lead to a lot of ethical issues. And yes, I understand that it is not liveable to give up everything that is unethical. But you can still have boundaries.

I mean like, buying oats and grains from a grocery store, which are typically grown domestically, compared to buying dead abused animals or bananas from a company that uses slave labor. Those are totally different things.

If you prioritize buying things that are made in countries that have better labor laws, and avoid animal products, then that’s a pretty damn good start.

I mean, most vegans would still commend your effort to reduce animal product consumption.

But from a moral standpoint, simply eating less animal products really doesn’t have much value. Imagine using your argument for other moral dilemmas.

“Racism is wrong, so I reduced the amount of racial slurs I use to only 1/3”
“Rape is wrong, so I only rape on Mondays now” (in reference to meatless Mondays)

I hate to be so militant about it, but you either think animal abuse is acceptable or you don’t.

Now, what I do think could be a moral standpoint, if you really want to still be able to eat meat, is to only eat “humane” meat. I put “humane” in quotes because even farmers with the best intentions are still killing animals young. I don’t personally believe any animal product can be humane, but even then I can recognize that any animal that was raised on a pasture and ate real food is more ethical to eat than one in a factory.

So if you genuinely only ate pasture raised beef and chicken (and you were sure about it), then I would say that is quite honorable.

Lots of open job positions is very healthy for the economy, it gives the worker the ability to choose, and it makes companies have to compete. A ton of companies are literally being forced to increase their wages in order to get enough employees.

Firstly, I think it completely aligns with libertarian principles to regulate environmental impact. If a company pollutes the airs and rivers, that physical affects everybody.

Secondly, yeah, it is sad that many consumers will turn a blind eye to poor working conditions and environmental impact … but I do think there is a limit. And honestly, most of the big companies in our nation are making some attempt to improve environmental conditions, probably because they know that some people will stop buying their product if they don’t. It’s not a lot, but I think the fact that it’s happening at all is some proof that companies can certainly be pressured into doing the right thing without legislation.

What I like about the free-ish markets is that it at least gives you a personal choice. If you don’t want to support a business, you don’t have to. It sucks if other people support it, but let’s be honest, if like 50% of the country wants to support a business that you don’t like, then what can you expect?

Respectfully, I think the opposite. I think, for the most part, a free® market naturally benefits humans with good intentions and harms those with bad intentions.

For example, let’s say in a free market, somebody wanted to start a business with horrible working conditions, horrible salary, horrible everything. Now, if the economy is real bad then people might work there, but for the most part, that business is going to fail because people won’t work there, and would choose other jobs instead. So in this case, a free market actually incentivizes “good intentions”. The business owner will have to improve work conditions, salary, etc. so that people will work there instead of elsewhere.

And one of the important aspects of a free market is the ability to start a competing business. If there was a company with overall poor working conditions and salary, it would highly incentivize someone to start a new company with better conditions, because they could pull in all the workers from the other company.

And look, I’m not saying this is fool proof and works 100% of the time, and I’m not saying there shouldn’t be a healthy amount of regulation. But if you compare this to an economic system where businesses are run by the government, you can simply just be stuck with shitty work conditions and shitty salary, and not be able to do anything about it.

I really hate this sentiment because if you actually look into the libertarian party platform and their recent candidates, they are nothing like Republicans. LP has supported LGBTQ+ rights for decades, they support open borders, support social freedom, don’t like religion in govt, etc. I mean, the only real overlap between the LP and Republican party is like, guns. I know many people would argue that they have similar economic policies but they really don’t, all Republicans have done in the last twenty years is spend more money and specifically only remove the regulations that are actually useful.

But at the same time, whenever I meet someone who calls themselves a “libertarian”… yeah 90% of the time they are just edgy Republicans.

Well, I wouldn’t go as far as to say that a natural monopoly doesn’t exist, but I think it’s pretty clear that big companies have a lot of influence on the government, and typically can lobby the government to pass policies that benefit them, and make it harder for competition.

And I think there’s an argument to be made that if the government were less powerful, then there would be less potential harm done when a corporation is able to influence the government.

I’m personally torn on this, because on one hand I think the government can be a useful tool in preventing monopolies, but on the other hand, I think expecting the government to not always work in favor of big companies seems naive.