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My experience is that people will be able to justify anything that is "normal". I went vegan after learning too much of how the literal sausage is made and the

• Ritewut 6mo ago
  They are letting perfect be the enemy of good. If they respond with "I love bacon" then tell them to eat plant-based + bacon. It's still a vast improvement environmentally than what they were doing previously.
  • OneMorePerson 6mo ago
    Yeah there's some kind of absolutism aspect tied into identity. Also the funny tendency humans have to dislike the people who are most similar to them. Someone who is at least recognizing factory farming is bad and willing to even think that far is more similar to a vegetarian than the people who don't give a shit and never even think about where their food is coming from. Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent.
    • alterom 6mo ago
      >Obviously there's the cognitive dissonance aspect to point out, but we are all doing that to some extent. Not necessarily. I mean, the people who give out an uncomfortable laugh do exhibit signs of cognitive dissonance. I don't have an issue with accepting both statements: factory farming is awful, and I still eat meat. There is no cognitive dissonance. The logic is straightforward: I do not believe that me, an individual, abstaining from meat is going to do much to factory farming, while it will make a huge, adverse impact on my life. Government regulation is how this problem would be solved (the only way it can get solved), and I'm all for voting for bans on factory farming, heavy taxes on meat products, etc. One's gotta pick their battles. I pick ones where my participation won't amount to martyrdom.
      • nickburns 6mo ago
        Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny. I eat meat. And I'm highly, highly morally conflicted. I'll leave it at that to avoid sounding hypothetical—except to mention that the only logical reason I don't go vegetarian/vegan is the work and personal development that'd be required of me. (I'll take being called lazy over disingenuous any day, if we're ostensibly virtue signaling here.)
        • aziaziazi 6mo ago
          Do what you like and as you like, but my two cents: if you want to make something that seems hard, start with one step and continue step by step at your own peace. Big goals are accomplished by proudness of small gaps instead of shame and desires of the missing ones. During 10 year I gently removed some ingredients of my diets/habits and added others in the meantime. It was longer but way easier than I imagined. Good luck, you lazy :-)
          • nickburns 6mo ago
            Hey, at my ripe, old age, I only started learning how to properly feed myself more recently than I'd like to admit. So I take your point about acknowledging one's baby steps once you successfully string a few together. Thanks for the encouragement!
        • alterom 6mo ago
          >Equating eating meat with martyrdom in the year 2026 is, in fact, the same cognitive dissonance you personally deny You completely missed the point. In the context of picking battles, martyrdom is (self) sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice, with no direct gain for the cause. Abstaining from meat, to me, will take away one of the not-so-many joys I have in my life, without possibly making a meaningful impact on unethical farming. I'm well off. You might be. Most people in the US are not. And in the end of the day, poor people are going to buy the cheapest products in the grocery store. So, there's always be a demand as long as there's supply. More than that. We don't really have a choice for where meat comes from anyway. There's no requirement to put that on the label, along with nutritional data. That, by the way, is another example where legislation can make a lot of difference. My point is that abstaining from meat is about as useful as that young man setting himself of fire in the US to help children in Gaza. Same goes about feeling bad about eating meat (while eating it). The impact on the cause is zero. Your energy would be better spent fighting the ag-gag laws, requiring disclosures on the labels, making ethically farmed products cheaper (and factory farmed produce more expensive), and so on. You having morally conflicted feelings doesn't help anyone. And it's simple, really: you are complicit in doing a bad thing. But the complicity is not in doing the thing, it's in supporting the system where in doing it is the rational choice for the majority of people. Your choice in doing or not doing the thing has very little impact on whether the thing happens.
  • bko 6mo ago
    I personally think vegans should consider eating cows. If you care about sentient life and abuse, think about how much meat one cow produces. Killing a single cow can feed you for well over a year.
    • malfist 6mo ago
      You say that like it's mandatory to kill sentient life to feed people. It isn't.
      • nickburns 6mo ago
        I can imagine this poster's chortle thinking to themself, 'they thought I meant the animals!'
      • amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
        I always wonder what vegans think is going to happen to all the pigs, cows, and chickens if people stop eating meat?
        • cfstras 6mo ago
          Demand would go down, so meat companies would reduce breeding to reduce output. Or start an ad & lobbying campaign to increase demand again.
        • marliechiller 6mo ago
          Billions of pigs cows and chickens will stop being massacred in grizzly ways? Yours is an extremely common and unfortunately ill-informed argument that I see a lot. If I was given the choice between end all suffering by killing all factory farmed animals right now vs perpetuate it, im choosing kill all animals right now
          • amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
            It sounds like you don't have a problem with killing animals. Is it just the living conditions? If we replaced factory farms with more ethical practices, would that solve the problem for you?
  • dfxm12 6mo ago
    To add a data point, I've reduced my meat consumption from "whenever I can" to "once a day" to "normally once a day, but some days none at all". It's really not that big a deal. I have no idea what this is doing to the environment, but I can confirm that I'm saving some scratch (bacon is expensive!), my hunger and tastebuds are just as sated, and my routine bloodwork has improved somewhat.
  • redsocksfan45 6mo ago
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• foobar_______ 6mo ago
  This very closely resembles my philosophy. I too downplay vegan/veggie because I don't want to cause a stir.
• deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
• chairmansteve 6mo ago
  >the impetus for me leaving tech. What do you do now?
  • tdb7893 6mo ago
    I started a master's in ecology with the hope of doinh a PhD after. Academia honestly sucks and has pretty bad culture issues (and like 10% of the pay) but I genuinely really like animals and it feels good to have my job be helping them. Personally I don't think I would recommend it. Not that it's necessarily a bad choice but I think that the people for who this is the right choice will feel compelled to make a change regardless of what I say (I know I had people trying to convince me to stay in tech). Fully changing careers like this and living the poor and overworked grad student life in my 30s has taken more commitment and stubbornness than I had expected but some fights are worth doing.
• ffsm8 6mo ago
  Eating meat is normal. Yes, animals have feelings and are intelligent (to varying degrees, but generally a lot more then most think). Modern meat factories are absolute shit shows and it's outlandishly bad our societies treat the animals like that. However, it doesn't have to be that way. And killing an animal for food which lived a nice life is perfectly fine. We're all part of the physical reality in which the survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Even if you want to put your head into the sand and deny this, animals eating each other is perfectly normal. And yes, humans are animals too.
  • nickburns 6mo ago
    Nowhere did GP say animals eating animals is abnormal.
    • ffsm8 6mo ago
      Right, they just heavily implied it with > It seems like if it's normal enough people will say something is bad and will happily do it anyway.
      • nickburns 6mo ago
        I disagree it was implied. Not to mention that in an honest conversation, I shouldn't have to point out that you've cherry picked a quote (which on its face doesn't mean what you apparently think it does) from its actual context.
      • Dylan16807 6mo ago
        I do not see that implication in those words. I take it much more literally. People overlook things that are simultaneously bad and normal.
        • ffsm8 6mo ago
          I cannot agree with that interpretation considering the rest of the comment But let's agree to disagree there
• bee_rider 6mo ago
  It’s sort of interesting that “I love bacon” turns into “I must have bacon on a scale that can only really be satisfied inhumane farming practices.” I suspect we could raise meat humanely if we had it on a weekly or monthly basis.
• notlenin 6mo ago
  to be fair, you can get "good" meat - factory farming is awful, but not all meat is factory farmed. You can eat happy animals, for example pigs that spent their lives outside being pigs, hanging out with their pig friends, and near the end of their pig lives had to go be eaten. If you believe plants are conscious too, that's probably more ethical than eating Nutella made with palm oil from forests that were completely massacred to harvest that oil (and even if you don't, the animals in those forests probably didn't enjoy their natural habitat being destroyed). In fact, I've had the idea floating around my head for a while now for "fully ethical" meat, where you don't even kill the animal, just wait around for it to die of old age. Depending on your views on euthanasia, maybe if the animal gets like cancer or something and is evidently suffering, gently kill it to put it out of its misery because that might overall reduce suffering. Also, pardon my asking a possibly stupid question out of ignorant curiosity, but if you're vegan for ethical reasons, why not eat eggs? My stepmom had some chickens a while ago, they lived lives that seemed pretty happy, they hung around the backyard eating stuff on the ground + the food we gave them, relatively free to move around (we did put up a small fence to keep them away from the dogs and cats, who did not exactly have a stellar track record of veganism, but they were free to roam inside that safe space) they laid eggs, because there was no rooster around to fertilize the eggs the eggs weren't going to go anywhere... did us eating those eggs hurt anyone?
  • zem 6mo ago
    I'm pretty sure a lot of commercial egg farming involves keeping the hens in bad conditions
    • fragmede 6mo ago
      You can't know out at a restaurant the what eggs they use, but at home you can buy eggs from sources you trust that don't keep hens in bad conditions.
  • jgord 6mo ago
    I think we have almost "fully ethical meat" now - engineered from tofu and other plant material. ps. Im by no means a saint in this regard, but I have moved to soy milk and eat much less red meat generally, both out of self-interest for the health aspects, but also partially as I think its better for the environment generally. I suppose I should give up chicken, but its a habit hard to break in my social circle. My point is a gradual move by degrees is still improvement, when integrated over the whole population.
• 1-more 6mo ago
  man look at everyone getting weird as hell about it under here. Good gravy!
  • tdb7893 6mo ago
    This comment section is actually pretty good and it's generally well intentioned so I'm not mad but it's the same stuff every time. It's like how a tall person I know hears the same "how's the weather up there" joke over and over and got tired of it. The only thing people will say that annoys me is the "but animals eat other animals" argument from otherwise intelligent people (no worries if children say it). I've yet to meet someone who sincerely thinks that what happens in nature is ethically okay (as a simple point, many animals will eat their own family when stressed and sexually assault each other constantly, which are very natural but obviously unethical for humans to do. I've seen animals torture and eat each other alive) so the whole argument is a waste of time. It's weird that the "it's natural" argument is probably the most common when many people will walk it back even before I point out the flaws.
    • kelipso 6mo ago
      Carnivores need to eat other animals to live. If a living thing needs to do something to live, then almost all cases, there is a very defensible argument for it being moral.
      • reverius42 6mo ago
        And humans aren't obligate carnivores.
        • deleted 6mo ago
          [deleted]
        • kelipso 6mo ago
          The argument is over whether a certain thing is moral or not. I argue that it is because carnivores need to do that to survive. Humans don't but does that affect whether that thing is moral or not? Then you would have to argue that an omnivore eating meat is immoral while a carnivore eating meat is moral. I wouldn't enjoy defending that statement.
• metalcrow 6mo ago
  I always think that this sort of culture and interaction was exactly was it was like to live during a time when slavery was legal and permitted. I hope in 100 year meat eating will be seen as similar.
• Detrytus 6mo ago
  I grew up watching my grandmother butchering a chicken for a Sunday dinner. Or my uncle butchering and skinning the calf. Knowing how the sausage is made does nothing for me. I can understand someone being vegan because they believe eating plants is healthier. I can understand being vegan because you don’t like the taste of meat. But bringing any moral/religious reasons for it always seemed silly to me. There’s nothing more natural than one animal eating another. Humans evolved from mostly vegetarian monkeys to predators
  • DangitBobby 6mo ago
    I don't find might is right to be a convincing moral argument. The only reason I was born a human instead of one of the 300 billion animals humanity consumes each year is the outcome of a lottery system, simple as that. Consider whether you'd feel the same way when applying a "veil of ignorance" test.
    • kelipso 6mo ago
      He’s not making a might is right argument.
      • DangitBobby 6mo ago
        Yes he is. "Nothing more natural than one animal eating another" is might makes right. It's also an appeal to nature, but in this case it's both.
        • kelipso 6mo ago
          Weaker animals can eat stronger animals. Pack animals, carrion feeders, bugs, animals feeding their offspring, etc. So almost entirely an appeal to nature argument.
          • DangitBobby 6mo ago
            I think we're going to have to agree to disagree.
• sharts 6mo ago
  Where did you go after tech?
• lo_zamoyski 6mo ago
  Have you ever reflected on the legitimacy of your sentinents? As in, you find “terrifying” that people find factory farming bad, but choose to consume its products anyway. But have you considered that perhaps the moral severity that is causing your reaction of horror is actually miscalibrated and unwarranted?
• DangitBobby 6mo ago
  I agree. It's easier to change your morals than your behavior, or contort your thinking around your own behavior until you can imagine it fits into the shape that you've decided your morals are, reality notwithstanding. I think that explains a lot of it, for unabashed meat-eaters. The other thing I see is casting every human as sacred and every non-human living thing as without value, or, at least less value than a single meal. Most acknowledge that animals lead internal lives while a small minority don't, but in both cases humans are the center of the universe around which the earth and the sun orbits, and we and our convenience and comfort is all that really matters. I have no doubt whatsoever that half the people I know and love would have owned slaves or at least defended slavery if they were born into a time where it was commonplace. They easily would have bought into nonsense science or religious arguments about the intelligence or moral value of this race over that, like they do for animals.
  • computably 6mo ago
    First off, I believe veganism is, probably, morally correct. However, I lead a morally imperfect lifestyle. I get around by driving or being driven in a car, even when it would only be moderately less convenient to walk or bike or take transit. A few dollars could feed children in poverty for weeks, and I spend on lot more than "a few" dollars on luxuries like travel. By my measure, knowingly choosing not to prevent human suffering on such a scale is massively worse than eating meat, but at the end of the day, I don't consider myself or others in my position to be monsters. > The other thing I see is casting every human as sacred and every non-human living thing as without value, or, at least less value than a single meal. While I believe non-human animals generally have greater moral value than a single meal - the most widely consumed animals are clearly capable of suffering and IMO intelligent enough for most to instinctively empathize with - I don't think it's particularly strange for humans to view humans as sacred. Many if not most people view morality as rooted in the golden rule, and non-human animals are incapable of making moral considerations the way humans are. Even just considering gut feelings - let's say we presented a trolley problem, on one side one's close friends and family members, on the other side some number of chickens. I would be very surprised at genuine responses opting to save the chickens. Personally, I would sacrifice literally any number of chickens.
• Fnoord 6mo ago
  Veganism is a terrible example in this context because that community is riddled with all or nothing dogma. If people were pragmatic instead, and the vegan community would quit alienating people the non-perfect, non-purists the world would be slightly better, too. For example, in my country licorice is popular. Whether it contsins gelatin or not, not one pig less will be killed because it is a by-product. 10 years ago, I went to a workshop (with DIY) on how to make vegetarian and vegan sausages, and since you mention sausage, I'll use that as another example. A sausage contains herbs and vegetables (to develop taste) and certain chemistry (= cooking) techniques, for example salt and to keep the product together. It is relatively easy to make something akin to that yourself. Heck, one can sauté carrots and build something akin to a hotdog fairly easy. Comparing it to gelatin is unrealistic, but to say sausages are made from the best meat of the animal? No, minced meat is not since then they wouldn't mince it (as rule of thumb). Frikadel is another example eaten a lot here (NL), the Germans also got their sausage culture. Meanwhile, there's a much more dramatic example: chicken. There's a lot less meat on those birds per serving, so suffering per human/day on avg omni diet is much worse. But does that mean one should avoid free range chicken eggs? No. And that is ignoring the environmental impact, since there too a vegan diet (with avocado and almonds requiring a plethora of water and movement of product to market) isn't ideal either (the latter might be less of issue for say Cali). So in short, we should welcome those people who love bacon to 1) consume less bacon 2) try vegn alternatives. But it doesn't have to be either they're vegan or omni 24/7. Flexitarianism is much more reasonable for a lot of people, and also many situations can arise where such is desirable (such as gifted food, festivities, etc). Written by someone who follows a pragmatic vegn diet.
• strken 6mo ago
  This is terrifying even if you're not vegan. There are moral questions raised by animal products that people should think about. I am worried by people who eat cheese without understanding bobby calves or rennet. Some people have thought about it and are just deflecting, of course, but not everyone.
  • lotsofpulp 6mo ago
    I do a lot of damage to other species and humans now and in the future with the energy use caused by my large detached single family home and various leisure travels and imported toys. The two paths I see would be giving up a lot, including my family since I doubt my wife would go along with it, and live a much less consumptive lifestyle, starting with less space. In the meantime, billions of people in China/India/Brazil/Nigeria are waiting to increase their consumption. Or I stick my head in the sand and continue ignoring the problem and living the one life I have, and let nature take whatever course it will.
• rcbdev 6mo ago
  Eating factory farmed meat is seen as very low-class and irresponsible in my immediate vicinity. I have a hard time imagining any of my work colleagues admitting to eating factory farmed meat, even if they do due to cost reasons. But farmers also enjoy high societal standing here, maybe that helps.
• card_zero 6mo ago
  I'm disconcerted from the opposite direction, because it seems people feel uncritical compassion for anything with a face, and they want to prevent suffering but instead of caring about the complexities of human anguish they seem to define it as "pain signals in vertebrates", and they call this ethics, but they just base it on vibes, and so maybe all their morality is incoherent intuition.
  • tdb7893 6mo ago
    Maybe it's a cultural thing but I've never met anyone like you describe at all (certainly none of the vegans I've met). What you describe is obviously a dumb way to think about ethics but I'm also skeptical any significant amount of people think that way
  • NonHyloMorph 6mo ago
    Can we please get back to the topic of palantir? The whole eating meat discourse is interesting but also distracts from the topic at hand: do people working at palantir pose themselves question what it means for them to work for palantir? What do we think should be a proper ethical norm regarding people working at palantir?
  • PearlRiver 6mo ago
    Everything humans believe is based on vibes- which happen to change with the centuries.